My Lords, I have to inform the House that Her Majesty has appointed Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Viggers KCB, CMG, MBE to be Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, in succession to Sir Michael Willcocks KCB, CVO, and that he is at the Door, ready to receive your Lordships’ commands.

Hear, hear!

My Lords, we are now here to pay tribute to the departing Black Rod, a sad occasion, because this Black Rod will be missed by the House, but an important occasion, too. The office of Black Rod is an important one for the realm, and when the holder of that office changes, it is an important moment for the House.

Others will follow me with tributes specifically focusing on particular aspects of the job, as it has been defined, of the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, on security, for instance, or on ceremonial matters. I am convinced that my job today is more difficult than theirs, because it falls to me to give to the House a sense of what Black Rod is like—difficult, because he is so well known to all Members of the House that each individual Member will have a clear view of what Black Rod is like.

As Black Rod, though a commanding figure, he has been assiduous in engaging with, communicating with, and talking to all Members on all sides of the House. He has seen, I believe, accessibility as a central part of his job. That may of course be because, as an old military man, Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Willcocks believes that it has been pretty well essential for him to know the lay of the land. It is as well, though, because he is a naturally gregarious and sociable man. Black Rod is a familiar figure to the House, whether swinging along Millbank of a morning, with his dog Sugar by his side, or in deep conversation in the Bishops’ Bar, or just being about the corridors of the House so that Members can tackle him on any issues of concern to them. In fact, so assiduous is he that I hope he will forgive me for revealing to the House his nickname in his old Army regiment, the Royal Horse Artillery. He was known, highly affectionately, after the old “Magic Roundabout” figure, as Zebedee—always bouncing about as if spring-loaded. To echo the noble Lord, Lord McNally, in his reply to the opening of the debate on the gracious Speech, “Boing!”.

Black Rod, too, is a familiar figure well beyond this House. Visiting a school recently, I was asking the pupils what they knew about Parliament. I talked a little about something that they may have witnessed on television—the State Opening of Parliament. What did they know about it? That was clear: “There’s a man with a stick, Miss, who bangs on the door three times every year. Miss, does he get paid for that job?”. Now, we happen to know that there is, perhaps, a touch more to the job of Black Rod than that, yet it does portray that office as a key symbol of Parliament and a fixture in the public consciousness of what Parliament does. Sir Michael has taken very seriously, as is right, those aspects of his job—his role in Parliament and his role as a member of the Royal Household. He has never been stuffy, but he has always been serious: serious in what has been his role, serious in how he has gone about it, and serious in what he has accomplished for this House.

There is, however, another side to Sir Michael—Mike to all who know him, although, as Leader, he and I both stick properly to our formal titles in dealing with each other, as he has quite rightly done with all my predecessors with whom he has so successfully worked in his eight years, all but a few weeks, in the role. He is, too, a well-spring of jokes and anecdotes. I shall not attempt to repeat any of them here, partly because I should pale in comparison to his own abilities, and partly because I do not have his particular skill of starting out with what looks likely to be an extraordinarily risqué joke that turns out, somehow magically, to be highly respectable.

Although we are used to seeing him formally attired and properly dressed, it has not always been like that. He is remembered for the occasions when he left behind at home his ceremonial shoes, and had to process in a natty pair of leather loafers, and for when he left his tights behind—Ede & Ravenscroft 60 denier, I am told—although history, perhaps thankfully, does not record his strategies to mount a cover-up and spare his, and our, blushes. However, he has been unembarrassed in wanting to spread the word about what this House does; those skills will no doubt stand him in good stead when he moves to his new role with the Press Complaints Commission.

As Black Rod, he has shown considerable leadership and prompted great loyalty among his staff. He may not always have agreed with the decisions taken by the House, but when he has not he has, despite his own views, as ever, enacted those decisions to the letter. He has, too, been a key member of the management team of the Lords. In particular, it falls to Black Rod to take on the highly unenviable task of arranging office accommodation for Peers, where his tact and skill in handling the difficult issues have been exemplary. His strategic work on accommodation, based around the planned island site for Lords offices, has been essential.

I take this opportunity to pay special tribute to him for the way he has handled the number of particularly difficult issues on which we have worked since I became Leader of this House, including the matter of the police inquiries earlier this year. Throughout those difficult periods, Black Rod, again, acted with tact, skill and sensitivity, as well as the required robustness when necessary. In doing so—just as he did when, a few short months into his job, he had to deal with the security implications of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for this House and, indeed, for Parliament as a whole—he has acted and accomplished things for the benefit of this House, for the benefit of the Members of the House and for the benefit of the country as a whole.

I welcome Lieutenant-General Sir Freddie Viggers as his successor as Black Rod, and Carl Woodall as Director of Facilities. I look forward to working closely with them both. I end, as I began, by thanking Black Rod for all that he has done for this House: for his courtesy, for his considerateness, for his care, for his attention, for his effort, and for his enthusiasm. We are all indebted to him, and we are all grateful.

My Lords, I wholeheartedly associate myself and this side of the House with the tribute that the noble Baroness the Leader of the House has just made in welcoming Lieutenant-General Sir Freddie Viggers and with her tremendous expressions of gratitude to Sir Michael Willcocks.

I would like to speak particularly of Sir Michael's role in ceremonial. Need I say more of Sir Michael's conduct than that it was masterly in every sense of the word? After all, he is one of the few to come under attack from that notorious network of spin doctors and not only to survive it but, with characteristic tenacity and courage, to teach those who tried to bully him a sharp lesson or two.

Ceremony is an expression of the roots and the continuities that are needed in a fast-changing modern world. It is an affirmation that institutions are greater than those who temporarily embody them and it is something that I believe we in Britain do better than anyone. Day in, day out, in small things and big, Black Rod has unfailingly seen that we put our feet in the right place—and he has never put a foot wrong either.

Sir Michael's place in the history books is assured, when all is said and done, for his conduct of, and in, that immense and moving event of the lying-in-state of a greatly loved Queen. No one who witnessed that event will ever forget it, or the fact that Westminster Hall was open 24 hours a day for people to pay their respects. It was largely thanks to Sir Michael that it was a unifying ceremony of state and nothing more.

In that great work of literature, the Alastair Campbell Diaries, Sir Michael is described as “that little … (expletive deleted)”. That accolade alone shows that he must have done something right. I am told that Black Rod's reaction, with that typically pithy sense of humour, was, “How dare he call me little?”

Sir Michael was a big man, in a great office, that he carried out with exemplary loyalty and devotion to this House and, above all, to the Crown. We will all miss him. We thank him sincerely, and we wish him well.

My Lords, I have said before that I always think these occasions are rather like the scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where the boys hide in the loft listening to their own funeral service. I am sure Sir Michael will be pleased that not only is he in the “loft”, but so, too, are many of the staff who worked closely with him, who are listening to these tributes.

It is my part of this carve-up to talk about his role in managing the parliamentary estate—a rather dull part of his role, your Lordships might think, but important. Probably no greater tribute can be paid to Sir Michael than the fact that, when he leaves, two people will replace him, in that a parliamentary estates manager will take over that part of his job. It is important that we understand what a difficult job it is properly to manage a building that is a world and national treasure and yet keep it working effectively as a modern Parliament, while at the same time managing it in a pull-me, push-me way, with other parts of the management at the other end not always working collegiately. To add to this problem, the whole thing is managed by committee. It must test a military man to the utmost to find that his ideas and his plans are then taken to a committee of politicians. Just for a fleeting moment you can sometimes see pass across his eyes the thought, “If I could get you lot on a parade ground for 15 minutes”, but then the diplomacy kicks in and he listens patiently while some of his carefully thought out ideas for making this place more efficient are slowly unpicked by people probably reading their committee papers for the first time. I wish him very good fortune in the future.

As well as his diplomacy, we have to recognise his courage. Certainly, the ex-Members of the other place will appreciate this. Every year, for eight years, we have sent that man down that Corridor to that Door, knowing that on the other side, waiting for him, is Dennis Skinner. That alone deserves another gong on the list that was read out. The greatest tribute to Sir Michael is that long before his term of duty was over, he managed to turn the press coverage of the annual event that has almost become part of our constitution in favour of Black Rod, rather than Mr Skinner.

It is a moment of parting. I know, as a member of the House Committee, just how much work and preparation has gone into the island site in particular. It will be Black Rod’s memorial when we eventually get it. In the meantime, along with the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and the Lord President, and—learning something new every day—I wish Zebedee a very happy retirement.

My Lords, I join, on behalf of the Cross Benches, in the tributes that have been paid to the departing Black Rod, and in warmly welcoming Sir Freddie Viggers.

A rough estimate indicates that there have been 57 Black Rods since 1361 when a certain Walter Whitehorse got the job of supervising access to the House of Lords. The job has changed in the intervening 700 or so years, but perhaps never quite as rapidly as during the tenure of Sir Michael, the 57th Black Rod. Sir Michael took over from his predecessor barely four months before that terrible autumn day, 9/11, when the focus of his job shifted dramatically.

As Black Rod knows better than any of us, Parliament is a key target for any would-be terrorist attack and the fact that our working lives have continued with serenity is not because of any lack of threat. It is due to the utter and constant vigilance of Sir Michael and his team, who have seamlessly introduced mechanisms that have kept us safe and Parliament accessible to record numbers of visitors. I include among these mechanisms the new access control system, off-site mail screening and, shortly to come, the off-site vehicle search facility. I suppose I also have to mention the Corus barriers.

I thank Sir Michael for keeping your Lordships safe, for all the marvellous parties and for the occasional glimpses of Sugar. I wish him all the best in his new post as charter commissioner at the Press Complaints Commission.

My Lords, from these Benches we add our appreciation for the remarkable service that Sir Michael has performed as Black Rod. As Bishops in the Church of England we know what it is to try to maintain confidence and stability when all around is changing. That has been Sir Michael’s calling, which he has performed with skill, humour and, at times, an appropriate righteous stubbornness. I also have to affirm that in his time the Bishops’ Robing Room has not been raided by the Metropolitan Police. We will miss him.

My Lords, perhaps I could say a final word in tribute, focusing particularly on Black Rod’s responsibilities for security. When I came into post Sir Michael came to see me and was extremely deferential and polite. He then informed me that when he needed to see me, he would see me and I would be there. With that relationship, we have continued, in perfect harmony.

Sir Michael has been particularly valuable to this House because the advice he has given on security issues, at a time when that advice was of crucial importance, has always been professional, as one would expect from his history, and his assessment of risk and of the measures to obviate that risk has been of the highest quality. However, that has always been tempered by an understanding of and commitment to the need for this place, this Parliament, to be accessible to staff, to Members and above all to the public whom we serve. For that I have the highest gratitude.

We will miss him. He has left his particular responsibilities in exceptionally good order. That, together with our limited knowledge of his successor, which tells me that Sir Frederick will very quickly become Freddie on non-official occasions, means that we owe him an even greater debt of gratitude.

Hear, hear.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what positions within the NATO military structure will be assumed by French officers when France rejoins the structure in the near future.

My Lords, first, I am sure that the whole House will wish to join me in offering sincere condolences to the family and friends of Lance Sergeant Tobie Fasfous from the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, who was killed on operations in Afghanistan earlier this week. On the Question, following the historic step taken by France to rejoin the military structure of NATO, the alliance is working to agree the positions that France will assume in the NATO command structure.

My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Baroness for that reply. Does the new co-operation between France and the other members of NATO extend to the operation of nuclear submarines and co-ordination in that matter? If so, can we be satisfied that there will be no more collisions such as the unfortunate one a few months ago?

My Lords, the co-operation does not extend to the nuclear side, where the situation remains as it was pre-President Sarkozy’s more recent decisions. On the collision, investigations are still going ahead. We are satisfied that there was no risk involved and we are looking at procedures to mitigate any risk that may occur in the future.

My Lords, I enjoin these Benches in the earlier tribute. Parallel to the very welcome rejoining of NATO by France on the military side, has the noble Baroness seen any commensurate increase in France’s willingness to co-operate in terms of defence equipment and procurement?

My Lords, we certainly welcome the increased commitment by France, although France has in fact been one of the top NATO contributors for some years, in terms of troops and the funding of operations. We are doing a great deal on equipment co-operation. The high-level working group is exploring further ways of co-operation between the United Kingdom and France. There are also other specific proposals, such as the United Kingdom/French helicopter initiative, which is aimed at bringing together helicopters, training facilities and maintenance facilities to increase the support that we can give in relation to helicopters on operations in Afghanistan.

My Lords, we on these Benches send our condolences, too, to the family and friends of Lance Sergeant Tobie Fasfous of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards. Can the Minister comment on reports that part of NATO supreme command headquarters may be relocated from the United States to France?

My Lords, I do not think that that is the objective of the discussions that are taking place. There has been speculation that a senior French officer will be located in the headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. There have not been suggestions that we should move everything from Norfolk, Virginia, to France.

My Lords, will the noble Baroness explain to those of us who do not have knowledge and experience how one achieves a risk-free collision of two nuclear submarines? It seems a bit odd.

My Lords, the management of risk is a challenging issue for many people in many areas. The noble Lord, with his experience as a pilot, will know that risk mitigation is very much a part of procedures in the airline industry, as it is in many areas of defence, both in operations and in the normal workings of the industry. We can have minor collisions or minor accidents. It is appropriate that we make assessments of all the potential dangers and mitigate any risks that may occur.

To ask the Leader of the House, further to her Written Answer on 4 March (WA 169-70), whether she will ascertain what the constraints were which delayed the answer to Lord Corbett of Castle Vale’s Question for Written Answer tabled on 3 December 2008 until 3 March (WA 140-41) and that of Lord Hylton tabled on 8 December 2008 until 11 February (WA 196).

My Lords, I owe the House an apology. The reply to the Question for Written Answer asked by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett of Castle Vale, was delayed due to the time taken to identify the document in question, to confirm that it constituted an official document, to check whether it amounted to confidential advice to Ministers and to ensure that all concerned were content with the response. The reply to the Question for Written Answer asked by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, was delayed due to difficulties with the distribution and submission of Written Parliamentary Questions, following the introduction of a new IT system in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office used for the drafting and dispatch of Written Parliamentary Questions.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that Answer. Is she aware that it gives me great pleasure that, by tabling this Question, I have been able to support her efforts to persuade her colleagues to answer Written Questions in a more timely fashion? The number outstanding for more than 14 days has now fallen to 40 or so, as opposed to well over 100, and we are all grateful to the noble Baroness for that. But could she say why it was that when I asked the Question earlier as a Written Question, Ministers simply brushed it aside and ignored it? It is long overdue that Ministers more often are given answers rather than just replies to pass on to those who ask Written Questions in this House.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord and to other noble Lords in this House who help to keep me and my colleagues up to the mark. It is useful to have assiduous colleagues, such as the noble Lord, snapping at our heels, if I might put it like that. Answers to Questions often do not answer the question properly; as the noble Lord says, they are replies rather than answers. Quite often we send the replies back, asking for answers. I think we should be even more assiduous and do more of that in future.

My Lords, I associate myself with the compliment from the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, but can I ask the Lord President to clarify another matter? When I first started working in Whitehall, betting and gaming was the responsibility of the Home Office. It was then moved to DCMS. When I want to ask questions or get advice on long-odds betting, is it now better to go to the DCMS or to the noble Lord, Lord West, in the Home Office?

My Lords, I would not bet on that.

My Lords, did the noble Baroness say that part of the reason for the delay was that a new piece of IT equipment had been introduced? What is the length of the extra delay that this machinery has caused, and what was the cost of it?

My Lords, I do not have the cost of that piece of equipment. Initially, there were problems because of the introduction of a new IT system, but they have been resolved. I think noble Lords will find that the Foreign Office has stepped up to the mark and Questions are now being answered in the appropriate amount of time.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the European Commission has started to train staff to serve in the European Union External Action Service, as envisaged by the Lisbon Treaty; and, if so, what long-term future they foresee for British Embassies.

My Lords, no, the European Commission has not started to train staff specifically to serve in the European External Action Service. This will only happen once the Lisbon treaty comes into force and the EEAS is established. The European External Action Service is not about replacing our embassies with union delegations. The treaty makes clear that the EEAS shall,

“work in co-operation with … the diplomatic services of the Member States”.

My Lords, I am grateful for that Answer, which tries to convince us that the octopus in Brussels is not putting a tentacle around yet another vital area of our national sovereignty. Is the noble Lord aware that an EU official admitted:

“We are trying to push the envelope as far as we can within the current environment”,

and that 530 Commission staff are being trained to work in the new embassies, in addition to the missions overseas? Can he tell your Lordships under which clause in the treaty of Nice all this is legal, and can he give us a firm guarantee that no British embassy will be closed as a result in the longer-term future?

My Lords, I would very much like to and can give assurances to the noble Lord. First, the 500 people were trained as part of a regular ongoing training programme whose origins date back to the establishment of Commission offices around the world as a result of the treaty of Maastricht. The training programme was reorganised by my noble friend Lord Kinnock some years ago, so it is a routine part of the Commission's work. There are now 130 overseas Commission offices. Sometimes, that is confused with the new external service, which is intended to secure better co-ordination between the Commission and the Council and is in no way intended to replace the embassies of member states.

My Lords, I ask the Minister, because this all seems rather strange to me: do they train 530 people every year since the Maastricht treaty came into force?

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness that if they trained 500 people a year, we would have a very large external service. I cannot at this moment provide the annual figures, but the point is that it involves people from different parts of the European Commission who, as part of their work, need to engage with the broader Community. I will provide her with exact numbers.

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, will forgive me if I refer to the previous Question and express the gratitude of the House for what he said about Written Questions. Although it was accidental and a normal procedure, it was fascinating to observe the change of sequence of the Question of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, deferring to the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, when on Monday it was the other way around. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, also abandoned the previous text of his Question for this one—quite rightly, because the previous text was totally incorrect in the fact that he was asserting. Does the Minister agree that the treaty text confirms in black and white that,

“the common foreign policy activity does not affect the member states’ own foreign policy priorities, nor national missions in both third countries and all international organisations”?

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord: he saves me from having to read out precisely the same quotation, which is indeed as clear as can be. That is exactly the case: the treaty makes it clear that there should be no replacement of existing national embassies.

My Lords, can the Minister confirm that a great many of the people who are being trained and, eventually, employed are employed in the chanceries accompanying the main offices and that they do very important and extensive work and will always be needed?

My Lords, I am delighted to confirm that. If we look at the work of the Commission around the world on issues as wide-ranging as the environment, commerce, trade, transport and human rights, we see that they are a series of activities of enormous importance. Most of us in the House believe it very important that the Commission carries out that work around the world.

My Lords, does the Minister have to hand the figures on how many overseas posts the British Government have closed in the past five years as a result of various cuts? Does he by any chance have figures on how many member states of the United Nations the British Government no longer have permanent representation within? Does he accept that there are some advantages in sharing facilities in small countries abroad? I am about to go to Reykjavik; I know that we share some facilities with the Germans there and in several other countries. Are there not arguments on grounds of cost and efficiency for sharing facilities with other European Governments?

My Lords, I do not have those figures immediately to hand; they are unhappy figures which I prefer to forget between the occasions when I am asked about the subject. Like the noble Lord, I think that Britain’s representation abroad is critical. We want to keep it as strong and universal as possible. However, where costs make that impossible, the fact that we can occasionally share offices with other European member states or, occasionally, even with the Commission is an economy measure which allows us to be present in more places than would otherwise be the case.

My Lords, can the Minister explain what the procedures are for deciding on a joint EU demarche in a particular capital? Are these settled locally or does Brussels have to be consulted?

My Lords, in most cases they are settled locally, where—under the current presidency, or where the president is not represented, the acting presidency in that country—demarches are settled on human rights and other issues. The Council of Ministers or other organs in Brussels occasionally determine that such a demarche needs to be made, so the instruction can occasionally also come from Brussels. However, there is a lot of delegated freedom for European diplomats collectively to act locally on key issues.

My Lords—with the leave of the House, as there are several minutes on the clock—I do not think that I heard the noble Lord give a clear, unequivocal guarantee that no British embassy will be closed in future as a result of this initiative. Is he aware of the confidential internal EU memorandum which recommends minimum disclosure of this initiative? Why would that be, if the noble Lord’s brief is correct?

My Lords, on the noble Lord’s second point, we have sought and received assurances in writing from the Commission that no preparations are under way in this area prior to the approval of the treaty by all member states. There were initial routine preparations under the Slovenian presidency in 2007, which always happens when there are preparations for a treaty to go into force, but those were suspended at the time of the loss of the Irish referendum and have not been resumed. On his first point, I say again that the purpose of this external action service is not to replace national embassies. What I cannot give the noble Lord, obviously, is an assurance that the current footprint of British national embassies around the world will remain exactly as it is for ever. Nor could I, in a sense hypothetically, tell him now what a Minister standing at this Dispatch Box some years from now might claim as the reason for opening or closing specific embassies.

My Lords—as we have time on our side on this occasion—can the Minister recall how many embassies Her Majesty’s Government needed in 1830 in order to conduct their international business? If he wants a bonus question, can he name more than half of them?

My Lords, this really is a new example of talking out the clock. On his question, the noble Lord will forgive me if I take the plunge and suspect that it was a very small number and that he would support the idea of British foreign policy today being conducted by such a small number of embassies. Let me also point out that in those days we did not need embassies where we had an empire.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many Gurkhas will qualify to live in the United Kingdom in consequence of the recent Home Office announcement.

My Lords, this Government recognise the courage, commitment and sacrifice that the Gurkhas have given this country; indeed, they brought in rules for the first time giving ex-Gurkhas the right to settle in the United Kingdom. Based on the revised guidance published on 24 April 2009, the Government provisionally estimate that over 4,000 Gurkhas and 6,000 of their dependants will meet the new qualifying criteria for settlement.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that Answer, but did not the Government fail to appreciate how extremely divisive the announced criteria would be? I am thinking of the requirement to have served for 20 years, when only officers are allowed to do so, with 15 years being the maximum for others. In view of the Government’s defeat yesterday, will the Statement later give all the information necessary? Will the changes that will be proposed as a result of yesterday’s defeat become effective immediately or will we have a date for when they will come into force?

My Lords, the Government take seriously the role and views of Parliament. Therefore, a Statement was made in the other place yesterday evening, which I will repeat later today. On numbers, one of the major difficulties seems to be the estimate from those who are supporting the Gurkhas that only 100 people would benefit from the new government proposals, whereas the Government’s estimate, which was based on Ministry of Defence figures, was 10,000, as I have just outlined. The test of this will be the examination of the 1,500 outstanding cases, which my colleague in the House of Commons, the Minister responsible for this, said would now be completed by the end of May. That will give us a much closer estimate and enable us to see who is correct—those who are very pessimistic about the number who will enter or those in the Government’s ranks who believe that the number will be in the area that I mentioned. Any new policy has to await the urgent examination of these cases and take account of the debate in the other place yesterday.

My Lords, I believe that it has been suggested that to allow all those who might want to come to this country would cost billions. What are those estimates based on? Is it, for example, pensions or housing?

My Lords, the totality of the figure is £1.4 billion, which was based on the maximum of 36,000 eligible ex-Gurkhas all taking up the option to come to the United Kingdom. In making estimates, one has to estimate the scenario that could be the most expensive. Some argue that fewer than that would wish to come. The figure will be tested in the debates next Tuesday, because the Minister responsible, Mr Woolas, will appear before a Select Committee on this issue. I would rather await that examination than attempt one myself.

My Lords, I have every sympathy with the Minister, who has, frankly, been dropped in it today in terms of this Question and the Statement later, but the reality is that the vote yesterday in the other place was a major humiliation for this Government and another nail in the coffin for what is clearly a dying Administration. When will the Government do the right thing and accept that all those who have served in our forces, including the Gurkhas, should be given a right of settlement? When will they listen to the parliamentarians and to the vast majority of people in this country?

My Lords, I appreciate the noble Lord’s sympathy. I feel more like a sacrificial goat than a sacrificial lamb, although I do not want to take that too far. This gives me a unique opportunity as a Minister to say that the Liberals did not do a lot about the Gurkhas when they were last in power. In fact, no Government did until this Government. In 1997, we introduced equal pay with the British Armed Forces and we have improved pensions. All the fairness that has been given to Gurkhas has come in the last decade. We believed that these regulations were full and fair, met the spirit of the judgment in the High Court and would command the respect and support of Parliament. However, it is clear from the views expressed in another place that they have not achieved that last aim. Therefore, they will be looked at again over the next few weeks. It is promised that the outcome will be reported to the House before the Summer Recess.

My Lords, the Minister is extremely fortunate that the late Lord Russell is no longer with us, as Conrad would now be on his feet giving details of the many benefits that former Liberal Governments gave to the Gurkhas.

My Lords, I was a great fan of the late Lord Russell, who was one of the clearest and most interesting speakers to speak on any Bench in this House. As a historian, he was excellent. Then again, the Liberals are quite good at history, but not quite so good at the present time.

My Lords, does the £1.4 billion relating to the 36,000 potential applicants take into account any taxes that they may have paid while they were serving as Gurkhas on behalf of this country?

My Lords, I am not sure whether the figure took account of tax, social cost and so on. Undoubtedly the area will be probed on Tuesday next week and the answer will come forth, but I am more than happy to commit to write to the noble Lord and to give the information as far as I can.

My Lords, would the noble Lord reflect back to what happened when Hong Kong went over to China? At that time there was tremendous pressure for those who lived in Hong Kong to be able to come to Britain if they wanted to. There was a terrible row because the Home Office did not want that. The officials said that there would be far too many people coming in. I was at the Home Office at the time and I thought that they should be allowed in, but I was told, “No, we can’t have it”. The result was that hardly anyone came in. If we gave the Gurkhas the right to come here, maybe very few would do so, but the ability to come would be a great comfort to them.

My Lords, it is a great comfort to me to know that the noble Earl, who was a distinguished Minister, found himself out of sympathy with Home Office advice. I am clearly not the first to find myself in that situation. On the more substantive point, this is a judgment that has to be made in the light of the decision in the other place. We have promised to ensure that the cases of those in the pipeline are not at all prejudiced. Those who are being reviewed before the end of May, if they have passed the criteria, will be granted leave. Those who have not will not be subject to any penalty or deportation until Parliament has had the opportunity to view and take a decision on new policies that may emerge in the next few weeks.

My Lords, with reference to the statement made just now, those who will be reviewed by that date in May will be reviewed on the present criteria of how many years, whether they have received a medal and so on. Decisions will be made on that divisive basis until that date in May, with any change happening after that. Is that correct?

My Lords, the noble Baroness says that it is divisive. Any criteria that take account of service other than 100 per cent of zero—in other words, people have eligibility simply by being a member of the Gurkhas at any time—will have to be cast in a discriminatory sense; there will have to be a qualifying period below which you do not qualify and above which you do. Taken with the other factors, that is part of the package that has not found favour in another place, so we will be looking at it. The 20-year factor produces a certain number, which will clearly increase if the factor of seniority is reduced from 20 years, but that is a judgment to be made in the light of the examination of the outstanding cases, taking account of the sentiments of Parliament.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, my noble friend Lord Brett will repeat the Statement on Gurkhas immediately after the debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater. Immediately afterwards, my noble friend Lord Malloch-Brown will repeat the Statement on Sri Lanka.

That the Commons message of 21 April be now considered; and that the promoters of the Manchester City Council Bill [HL] and Bournemouth Borough Council Bill [HL], which were originally introduced in this House in Session 2006-07 on 22 January 2007, should have leave to proceed with the Bills in the current Session according to the provisions of Standing Order 150B (Revival of bills).

That this House do agree with the order made by the Commons set out in their message of 21 April.

That the draft orders and regulations be referred to a Grand Committee.

That the debate on the motion in the name of Lord King of Bridgwater set down for today shall be limited to three and a half hours and that in the name of Baroness Knight of Collingtree to one and a half hours.

To call attention to the contribution made by British armed forces to the defence of the United Kingdom and to peace-keeping activities around the world; and to move for Papers.

My Lords, I start with a tribute to our Armed Forces that is neither facile nor routine, but a genuine recognition on this day, when a memorial service is being conducted in Basra to those who have lost their lives in the Iraq campaign, of the debt that we owe to our Armed Forces. Many criticisms have been made of the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, not least in your Lordships’ House, but virtually none has been made about the conduct and outstanding performance of our Armed Forces in the circumstances in which they find themselves, some of which are extremely dangerous, where the loss of life could have been extremely high but where their courage, professionalism and morale have saved the day.

It is a sobering thought that we are discussing the involvement of our Armed Forces in two campaigns, both of which have already lasted significantly longer than either of the two world wars, and it is right that we should recognise at this time the price that they have paid. In Iraq, just under 180 lives have been lost, and in Afghanistan, 150. But I include immediately those who have been very seriously and seriously injured. Earlier the Minister very properly expressed her condolences at the loss of another life, but I hope we never forget those whose lives will never be the same again. In Iraq, there have been 220 very seriously or seriously injured casualties, while during the first three years of the Afghanistan campaign, from 2003-05, there were only 10. Over the past three years, however, there have been 185. I add also another category that is of increasing significance and about which there is a real and increasing concern. I refer to those suffering from mental health problems resulting from stress as a result of the particularly difficult nature of these campaigns. Between 2003 and 2006 the number being managed for mental illness by the Defence Medical Services was 2,300, but in 2007 alone the figure rose by a further 1,900. I do not have the figure for 2008, but I fear that it will continue to increase.

Against that background, we are concerned about the situation of our Armed Forces. Many noble Lords and many Members of the other place have visited our forces in the front line and, without exception, have come back with admiration for the morale, good spirits and enthusiasm of the troops they meet. However, in a sense that is one of the great difficulties for those trying to assess correctly the morale of the Armed Forces. A tradition of loyalty to the regiment, loyalty to friends and colleagues, and the discipline of a sergeant-major perhaps listening around a corner to the answers being given to visiting dignitaries of one sort or another makes it hard to get the real picture. There is no question that we now face a very serious situation indeed.

I turn to the issue of resources in the widest context, even before the collapse of the Government’s financial situation in terms of the public finances. This was clearly described by no less an authority than the late Sir Michael Quinlan, who knew about these issues as much as anyone, as the most difficult defence budget position he could remember. Given the procurement issues as well, it is an unsustainable position. We are facing serious overstretch. We have far too many “pinch points”, as they are described, particularly in the Army, even among infantrymen. This means that, with the demands we make on them, we cannot abide by the manning balance—having the number of troops required to discharge their undertakings. A year ago it was forecast that the Army would not be back in manning balance before 2011. This is the challenge we face.

Distinguished and gallant noble Lords in this House will say that the Army will always rise to a short-term challenge. It will always meet short-term extra-stress requirements of that kind. If the challenge is continuous and there is no end in sight, however, it becomes a serious problem. In the Continuous Attitude Survey conducted on an annual basis, a poll of 36 per cent of those serving revealed that the majority did not feel valued, were dissatisfied with their equipment and resources and were concerned about the impact on their personal and family life. Their intention to leave had been increased. The family strain is particularly serious not necessarily for the youngest recruits and the newest members of the Armed Forces but for that key core structure of more experienced officers and senior NCOs who are the essential fabric of our Armed Forces and whose family responsibilities are a major challenge. My purpose, against this background, is to discuss what our duty is in this House and to try to impress on the Government what our duty should be to those who serve us so well, both those who serve us now and those whose contribution has already been made.

Those who talk about our Armed Forces as a force for good in different parts of the world have first to ensure that when we ask them to embark on these undertakings they have realistic objectives in a realistic timeframe. We know the challenges we faced in Iraq when we went from being liberators to an occupation force. In Afghanistan the latent hatred that has existed for hundreds of years against the foreign invader can all too easily be roused up against people whose intentions are benevolent.

We need good intelligence. I do not mean immediate intelligence, such as the issue over the dossier, but an understanding of history. Noble Lords may have noticed recently that the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology issued a paper entitled Lessons from History, which asked why should we use history for policy making. It was talking about science and technology, but why not use history also for our foreign affairs and defence? It is interesting to look at learning the lessons of history. I do not know how many noble Lords heard today the BBC reporter who was on his way to the memorial service at Basra but was actually standing in the desert beside the memorial to those who lost their lives in 1921 in another ill-fated Iraq expedition. It was all the more tragic to hear that against the background of the tributes now being paid to those who recently served in Iraq. The BBC report also said that after six years of our activities the canals are full of sewage, there is no regular supply of electricity and no clean water is available in Basra. That is a tragedy.

In the Prime Minister’s Statement on Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday he sought to adjust current policies to the realities of the situation. I wonder whether among his voracious reading he has ever read Winston Churchill’s first book, The Malakand Field Force. I do not know whether noble Lords are familiar with it. I direct them to chapter 6, which is an account of the challenges faced when there is an uprising against the Government, led by tribesmen who have taken up arms under religious fanatic leaders who seek to establish an Islamic caliphate. For those not familiar with where Malakand is, it is just next door to Swat, which at this very moment has been handed over by the Pakistan Army to the kind auspices of the Taliban. The lessons from history are all before us.

One of the difficulties we have got into is that we did not drawn on the resources of history, most of all in this country, enormously well contained in the Foreign Office. We have a reservoir of experience in our former and current ambassadors. One of the tragedies for the United States and our country is that the State Department, with all its experience, was sidelined and the Pentagon took over. In our country, insufficient attention was paid to the experience and knowledge of those who could have given guidance, not least in the Foreign Office. In any activity of this kind, for us to be a force for good, diplomacy is infinitely preferable to armed force. We need to use the resources of history, which are important in determining the likely attitude of our allies. One of the biggest disappointments at present is our failure to get more help and genuine wide support from NATO allies in the challenges we face.

It is our duty to ensure that our troops are properly equipped and supported. The financial pressures that we face are inevitable. That will mean a major reassessment, whether or not it becomes a major review. There must be some shift in the resources to meet the needs of the challenges of current insurgencies, and at this stage that may be in preference to the resources for conventional warfare that might arise in the future.

There is also the duty of aftercare. We pay tribute to the dead, but I have already said that we should recognise the importance of casualties, whatever form they might take. I notice that Dr Liam Fox, the shadow defence spokesman in another place, talked about the mental health time bomb. Certainly, there are some worrying statistics. I know that the Government have recognised some aspects of this but there must be a much more proactive follow-up, not just letting people come forward in the end if they think they are suffering, but careful aftercare for all those who have served in these difficult circumstances.

I declare a slight family interest in this. I had the opportunity to speak to the Veterans Minister two days ago. One of the tragedies for the Armed Forces is that a number of our ex-service people who have come back from serving in Afghanistan and Iraq are now homeless, unemployed and facing serious personal circumstances. One imaginative approach to this, which I hope the Government will pick up in a significant and substantial way, is the pioneering work of the Community Self Build Agency. People without jobs and housing, under certain arrangements, can be encouraged to build their own homes, rehousing themselves and, in the process, rebuilding their lives. That therapy is very effective.

I am delighted at how many noble Lords wish to speak in this debate. The background is that our Armed Forces have performed outstandingly for us, but in many significant ways we have let them down. We are not giving them the support, the resources or the clear, realisable objectives that they should have been entitled to expect in return for the courage that they have shown. We have been warned that there is a real risk that our Armed Forces—the Prime Minister referred to them yesterday as the finest in the world—could be relegated to the second division in terms of all-round capability and the quality and scale of the resources and the training that are available to them. If that did happen it would have a serious impact on our standing in the world and our ability to be an influence for good in the world.

The previous Prime Minister, in a speech that he made in Plymouth towards the end of his premiership, said:

“The nation must decide what we want our country to do and then fund it”.

That was a valedictory message that was not carried forward. If there is continuing severe overstretch, restrictions on adequate training and shortage of appropriate equipment there is genuinely a risk that we will be relegated. We must not let that happen. It would be the greatest betrayal of our Armed Forces who have served us so well. Governments are the trustees for the nation of our Armed Forces during their period in office. Obviously there is the prospect—it might be said the reality—that there may be new trustees in place shortly. There is no doubt that the challenges that they face will be as great as any incoming Government have faced in terms of our defence capability. I beg to move.

My Lords, I ask the House to note that there is absolutely no leeway on the time allotted to speakers.

My Lords, this is a timely and fortunate opportunity for us to debate the role of our armed services. I commend and thank the noble Lord, Lord King, for giving us this opportunity to talk about these serious issues. He and I have both had responsibility for the great office of state in charge of the Ministry of Defence and we know how complicated and difficult it can be. Since it essentially revolves around people, their welfare and consideration are high on the priority list. It is interesting that we said farewell today to Black Rod, General Willcocks, who served with me in the Ministry of Defence and then with me at NATO as Britain’s military representative. He was outstanding in Bosnia and other areas of conflict, and we wish him well.

Of course, we will all pay tribute to our troops today, which is right and proper. I will certainly do so. The noble Lord, Lord King, has pointed out their sacrifices and some of the continuing problems, and I subscribe to everything that he said. We need to go beyond words. Fine debates here and in the other place do not necessarily make a lot of difference. We pay tribute to the fine professionals out there, most of whom are very young, who serve this country and the international cause. We are reminded by the death of a Welsh Guardsman this week of the price paid by them in the defence of liberty of this country and the wider world community.

I pay tribute to the civilians who also help our forces in theatre, because they share some of the dangers as part of the reconstruction element and they deserve commendation for their support of our troops. I associate my sentiments with the noble Lord, Lord King, in praising the families of our service personnel. Without their support and stoic undertakings, our troops would not be able to do the job. I remember in my period during the Kosovo campaign talking to spouses and family members. The strain is enormous and permanent. It is not easy to resolve, so they deserve commendation from us as well.

The noble Lord, Lord King, mentioned mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder, which is an increasing problem given the nature of modern war. I have a vivid memory of going to Omagh as Defence Secretary after the bomb and talking to the troops there. Hardened infantry soldiers, trained in the art of defence and used to using their arms were absolutely affected by the carnage they saw in the streets there. They may have been used to battlefield casualties, but they could not cope with babies blown apart, small children destroyed in the streets of that small village in Northern Ireland. I remember sharing the trauma with them and advising them that mental injury is as great a problem as physical injury and that they must take steps to make sure that they retain their strength and their sanity.

There are so many issues that could be dealt with here; the noble Lord has dealt with many of them and I associate myself with him. Let me make comments about three areas. One is about NATO. Our troops serve under a NATO flag in Afghanistan today, but NATO is not some amorphous organisation; it is not the European Commission, it is not the United Nations, it is simply the product of 26—about to be 28—individual nation states and it is as good or as bad as those nation states make it. To characterise NATO as some great amorphous force is to completely misunderstand the nature of the organisation. I know that Ministers are looking at NATO at the moment with the idea of reform. A new Secretary-General is about to take office, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, and we all wish him well. He has impeccable credentials. Reform must be high on the agenda. Getting NATO to operate as an integrated command, as it was originally designed, where the risks, the burdens and the credit get shared, must be high on the agenda.

I would like to say how pleased I am that France has now fully rejoined the integrated military command. The terms on which it has rejoined are a huge bonus. It appears that a French general will take over in Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia. This is a post that was created under my stewardship, replacing the old Allied Command Atlantic. Transformation command was designed to make sure that the United States and its allies would always be able to work together. A French general, committed to strong European forces as part and parcel of the alliance, is a great bonus that we can look forward to.

On British domestic defence, I conducted a Strategic Defence Review in 1997 and 1998 and I am glad that I got a lot of support and input from previous Defence Secretaries and Defence Ministers at that time. It still remains the template for what we do in the world today, but 10 years is too long. It has had additional chapters and has been refined in certain ways, but it is time now for a fundamental Strategic Defence Review, because the circumstances of 2009 are not the circumstances of 1998. This Government should start it and, whatever happens after the election, it should be continued. It should be done in the way we did it in 1997 and 1998—openly, transparently, inclusively and fundamentally, looking at every capability that we have and whether it is necessary or needs to be augmented. It has to be based on the national security interests and foreign policy of this country. Only in that way will we be able to properly deliver defence forces for the future and to justify the faith that troops have on the ground as well.

Afghanistan is a place where our troops are caught up just now. I have not got time to go into it in detail, but I simply say this—there is a disconnect between the bravery and professionalism of the people who fight out there and the people in this country who do not understand sufficiently that their safety is connected to that bravery and that commitment. We, the political leadership in this country, have an obligation and a fundamental responsibility to make sure that people understand why they are out there, why they are making that sacrifice and why it is connected to our safety and security in this country.

My Lords, this is one of those debates where you look at the list of speakers and tremble slightly. I do not know whether my words will add to the greater volume of knowledge by the end of this debate, but I will certainly acquire greater knowledge.

It was a problem that I could find very little to disagree with in what the noble Lord, Lord King, said; virtually nothing until his last couple of sentences. The fact is that we are in an ongoing war, for which we were not prepared and for which our Armed Forces were not really designed. We have prepared on the hoof our level of equipment, design and tactics to try to meet the targets. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, suggested, our Armed Forces are involved in a major structural alliance that was designed for another era. The fact that NATO now includes Poland suggests that something that was designed to combat the Warsaw Pact is totally out of date. All our structures and our thinking need to be attacked from that point of view, and it is from there that we need to go on.

As the noble Lord, Lord King, said, the fact that we are fighting an ongoing conflict means that we should fundamentally deal with that conflict, because it will be a long slog. People have suggested that there might be elements of engagement there for decades, so we must make sure that our troops on the ground have the appropriate equipment and the appropriate structure to deal with this. This argument is not that new. The minute that the Cold War was seen to be over and other disputes broke out—the Balkans being the classic one—the idea of smaller, peacekeeping units trying to get between not very sophisticated armies, using cheap, mass-produced weapons with which the world is still awash, was seen to be the format in which we should be specialising. How far have we engaged in making sure that this is the case? Is our investment in the right type of technology? Main battle tanks might have been quite useful when we rolled into Iraq, but we discovered that we did not need them. Our light armour was quite sufficient for the job, because our enemy simply cannot match us. Are we liable to meet someone there? Are we going to invest in new forms and structures of defence?

Can NATO be developed into something that will enhance that role? Having read some of the NATO articles, I have come to the conclusion that it thinks that to still be relevant it must take on much more this role of peacekeeping, monitoring and helping. This role will also probably seem more attractive to its newer members. We must make sure that we do not give nationalistic politicians in Russia an excuse for going clinging back to nurse, saying “We are still being persecuted”. We should try to move away from what is left of the confrontational structure.

I shall move on to talk about the support and care of our service men and women. Both noble Lords have spoken about combat stress, and I endorse what they have said. Let us not fool ourselves. Combat stress is only a part of the problem. We are discovering that those who leave the Armed Forces, particularly in the junior ranks, seem to be particularly badly prepared for civilian life. These people often join the Army young and then do not have to deal with the mundane difficulties of life, such as organising how to pay bills, where you go and what you do, and how to find accommodation. They might have low literacy skills and so on; I have discovered that the Army is one of the better employers of dyslexics. The Army gives them structure and help but they are then, after X number of years, effectively dumped on the street.

They are then told, as the noble Lord has said, that they can get help if they ask for it: “If you fill in form XBY, turn up on time, in the right place and say the right thing, you will get help”. That is a recipe for only those who least need it getting the best help; only those with parents who are capable of assisting them, for instance. Let us face it: these people will not be that young when they leave. The Ministry of Defence should have a good look at the experience of, say, the department for education in getting support and help for people. The Armed Forces should take on board the idea that only the middle class, who can probably subsidise these things, get the help because it is difficult to access through bureaucracy. They should make their help available to those who need it.

I hope that the Minister can respond to that. How well does he think that the Armed Forces are doing in ensuring that their support for ex-servicemen gets to those who need it most?

My Lords, over the course of many debates on defence and the Armed Forces, I and a number of other noble, and noble and gallant, Lords have cautioned, warned and, when that was predictably to no avail, criticised the Government fairly and not unreasonably. It is now generally recognised that, among other things, we should not have charged into Helmand province of all places, in the south of Afghanistan. We had, at first, token forces and totally inadequate weapons, vehicles and munitions. We were still committed significantly in Iraq and in pursuit of an unrealistic aim and strategy. If anything, that made the terror situation worse, not better, and a price had to be paid in significant battle casualties.

Now, poised as we are on the brink of a new strategy in Afghanistan and with an all-embracing funding problem, this may well be an opportune moment to remind the Government to face up to realities and their responsibilities. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgewater, on this debate and on introducing it with his customary penetrating clarity bred from considerable experience, all of which I warmly endorse.

Noble and noble and gallant Lords have also made some, I hope, helpful suggestions in these debates. It is to the Government’s credit that, over the past two years or so, the Ministry of Defence has made strenuous efforts to get our Helmand force in better balance and provide the proper equipment and supplies to support, sustain and protect our land and air forces in that area, where they still have such a difficult job to do. However, it is equally clear that, as a result of the urgency of all this, and because of continuous cheeseparing over the past 10 years or so, they now have a fundamental funding problem on their hands, accentuated by the recent Budget, of which more in a moment.

However, we are now committed to Afghanistan and, for many compelling reasons, there can be no going back in the foreseeable future. Indeed, our best hope is wholly to support the United States, to the limit of our resources, in its new, more enlightened strategy, with a strong—albeit temporary, I hope—surge of forces to give people in that vulnerable area proper rather than fleeting protection, with less talk of democracy and more of stability. There must be meaningful negotiations and financial inducements which could help separate the moderates from the fanatics, who must then be isolated and dealt with. We must have better directed and more quickly implemented financial aid.

We must also work as closely as possible with Pakistan. It was good to hear the Pakistani president welcome the initiative of President Obama, giving us hope that we can, despite all of Pakistan’s very real internal problems, work together in some common cause, to our mutual benefit and for the benefit of the peace of the world. In conjunction with our well motivated, highly professional American and Canadian friends, and with others from a still somewhat lukewarm NATO, all of that will require our best shots. At the moment, we have no alternative but to provide and sustain them, fortified by the wonderful sense of duty and esprit de corps of our Armed Forces that the noble Lord, Lord King, brought out so well.

Finally, while the Secretary of State has a significant war to oversee and manage, he has another major problem: a virtual black hole between established requirements and the resources that the Treasury is likely to make available. If the Treasury is to get its pound of flesh, as it usually does, that will require some very hard decisions, particularly if our best-shot operations in Afghanistan are to be fully supported and sustained, and those personnel matters such as medical, housing and welfare—the ones that fall off the bottom when you try to squeeze a quart into a pint pot—are not to suffer in a way that would rupture the military covenant, now so generally recognised as essential for the well-being of our Armed Forces. That means that the higher-spending items of equipment will have to be looked at rigorously.

What we really need is a proper defence review, but that will clearly not happen before the next general election. Meanwhile, a similar intellectual rigour will have to be turned on the more expensive items in the current three to five-year spending cycle. Of course, what is kept in or left out is a matter for the chiefs of staff to recommend as they, chaired by the Chief of Defence Staff, try to find that difficult balance between the most urgent operational needs and what the longer term may require if our forces are to be capable of taking part in any wider and more sophisticated conflict. That capability cannot be produced from a standing start.

We must look again in more detail at how we spend our money in the context of, perhaps, a more flexible approach to our independent nuclear deterrent and what exactly follows Trident, and when, and, certainly, with the general recognition that, since the Cold War, the world scene and the scale of urgency of future threats have changed considerably. We cannot automatically feel bound by old Cold War cries and clichés such as, “You must have four and not three nuclear submarines, because there must always be one on station”. Indeed, I was surprised to hear the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, repeat that in an otherwise wide-ranging and flexible summing-up of a foreign affairs debate.

The same intellectual rigour needs to be applied to the carrier argument. The Royal Navy has tasks that fall upon it regularly in peace and war—some on every day of the week—while we should take into account the new dimension of piracy. In order for it to do those tasks, we should look at whether the Navy would prefer two less than fully equipped carriers with greatly reduced and, I would suggest, insufficient small surface ships and killer submarines or, perhaps, one fully equipped carrier with everything required to fly off it and to protect it and, perhaps, rather more ships for their everyday tasks.

There is no doubt, then, that the Secretary of State has some real problems on his hands. I hope that the Minister will give us some idea how the Government are facing up to those problems and how they are likely to be resolved in the near future, while ensuring a proper defence of the United Kingdom against a variety of eventualities, and proper support for our foreign policy and interests abroad—whether that involves peacekeeping, enforcement or something even more decisive and intense altogether.

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord King, for enabling this important issue to be debated in your Lordships’ House in these troubling times. In this brief intervention I shall argue that, honoured and respected though the British Armed Forces might be, as the noble Lord, Lord King, indicated in his speech, they are presently so stretched in both personnel and resources that their effectiveness is close to being dangerously at risk.

Obviously, in the shadow of the financial crunch it is not easy to find ever more money for the Armed Forces but, following the speech of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, I suggest that substantial sums could be released if Her Majesty’s Government were to decide not to proceed with upgrading the Trident nuclear weapon system. Nor is that simply a financial matter; I, like many of your Lordships, am of the generation that grew up under the shadow of the Cold War, and it is at least arguable that in those dark days the world was, through the nuclear deterrent, spared a horrific global war which would have been catastrophic even using conventional weapons.

As your Lordships are aware, toward the end of those deeply worrying times, in 1968, the United Nations sponsored the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The signatories agreed a three-pronged deal. The nations without nuclear weapons would not seek to develop them, provided that those with nuclear weapons agreed to progressively disarm, while knowledge for the peaceful use of nuclear energy would be shared. It was also agreed that the signatories would meet at the UN every five years to review progress; I understand that such a meeting is planned for next year. Her Majesty’s Government argue that they have honoured the treaty by reducing the total number of nuclear warheads and their delivery systems, but that argument lacks conviction if upgrading the Trident system results in the possession of fewer but more powerful and sophisticated nuclear weapons. The moral, and perhaps legal, case against countries such as Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and India developing their own nuclear weapons is subsequently weakened.

Some argue that the possession of nuclear weapons—whether or not they could ever be of practical use in the world of today and tomorrow—is a badge that a country like Britain needs, because it demonstrates that the nation is a world power worthy of respect. I believe, rather, that Britain is more likely to be respected if it is prepared to play its part in peacemaking and peacekeeping by supplying Armed Forces who are professional, disciplined, and well resourced with the personnel and equipment needed to respond quickly and flexibly whenever and wherever they are needed. Would the estimated £20 billion needed to upgrade Trident not be better spent in that way?

My Lords, although I have had the honour of being a member of your Lordships’ House since 1991, I have rarely taken part in a debate as I was, until quite recently, the executive chairman of P&O. I have the honour of being an honorary commodore of the Royal Navy, heavily involved with the reserves over the past two decades, with the advantage of knowing and exchanging views over many years with the various Chiefs of Staff of all our defence services, particularly those presently in command.

I also have the pleasure of being chairman of Motability, which, some 25 years ago, took over the responsibility of providing adapted cars for all our disabled servicemen. At the moment some 17,000 recipients are eligible, of which today many thousands have Motability cars. I want to share an experience that I had last year, at Motability’s 30th anniversary celebrations at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Her Majesty the Queen was handing over keys to newly disabled servicemen. The Queen then spoke to a young 20 year-old Royal Marine; he was accompanied by his carer and was recovering at that marvellous hospital, Headley Court. Both his legs had been blown off above the thigh. A fine athlete at school, he had passed out only seven months earlier in front of his proud family. For me it was a most poignant moment. What of his future? He could have been my grandson. This, I suppose, is the cost of war, or perhaps a more correct way of looking at it is that this is the cost of peace. I could not support more strongly the views expressed by my noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater with regard to casualties in the armed services and their families. There has been some improvement but it is still shaming for all of us that there has been such reluctance to get the proper support for these brave young men and women who serve their country with a total sense of duty and pride, putting their lives on the line at our behest.

In recent times our armed services have been actively engaged in conflict for some 25 years, and for its size we probably have the most battle-hardened, experienced and professional defence force in the world. Apart from our deep involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Royal Navy is leading the European Union naval force, whose operating headquarters is at Northwood, where it also runs the Maritime Security Centre (Horn of Africa). At this very moment oil tankers and LNG carriers are traversing the Gulf of Aden en route to our shores. Energy security is critical and a natural role for our Navy. Protecting our trade routes has always been, and will continue to be, crucial to this country.

Our Chiefs of Staff and senior officers of our defence services are highly talented and experienced, and the present Secretary of State for Defence is deeply committed to their strategic needs and is strongly supportive of their endeavours. Nevertheless, as has been said, they can do only so much with limited resources. Defence reviews have pretty well become shorthand for cuts. The most recent will have the effect of our not being able to fulfil our present undertakings and certainly will not meet the needs of the procurement programme already agreed.

Should we be Treasury-driven or policy-driven? We have reached a critical crossroads at this time and there is no way we could seriously engage in another area of conflict without reducing forces in other areas. Of course, I am more than aware of our present financial challenges, but the world moves on and in my view these cuts are hugely short-sighted and we are putting our heads in the sand. Not to play with words, I say that it is no less than appeasement. There are still many in this House who not only remember the dangers of appeasement but risked their lives in active duty because of it, of which the noble and gallant Lord, Field Marshall Lord Bramall, knows better than most. My own company, P&O, suffered huge losses in both world wars. Before it is too late, this great country of ours must have a major strategic debate on the role of our defence forces for the future—a key part of our national security. It must be a debate which I sincerely hope will come to a rapid and positive conclusion.

I believe that we have a moral duty, if that is not an outdated expression in this day and age, to have a response force of a size and flexibility that in time of need is both a deterrent and has the capability to help, for example, members of the Commonwealth. It is too easily forgotten how they flocked to help us in the past two world wars and other conflicts. Many small countries throughout the world still look to us for leadership, help and protection in these uncertain times. Sadly, the world is not only unlikely to change in the near future, indeed it is likely to become even more dangerous. If such a debate concluded that this was the right way forward but that it would take, say, 3 to 3.5 per cent of our GDP, I for one would say so be it. It is our duty. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said, it is vital that everybody in this country fully understands the reasons for such a decision and is strongly supportive of it.

The defence of the realm and our future role in the international world is the first duty of Government, and therefore their key priority. I hope noble Lords will agree that it is very much the responsibility of this House, and indeed of Parliament itself, to ensure that the right decisions are made. Time is not on our side.

My Lords, I, too, welcome this timely debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord King, for initiating it. It is a pleasure to see the noble Baroness, Lady Park, in her place and taking part in this debate.

This is a busy week for the Armed Forces. Many of us will have seen on television this morning the moving ceremony that took place in Basra, which was a timely reminder of the price that our service men and women pay day in and day out for carrying out our foreign policy. Yesterday, a decision was made in relation to the Gurkhas. I have no doubt that that will come up in the debate. I think that the right decision was reached in the end. I look forward to my noble friend Lord Brett repeating the Statement made in another place. I hope the Government do not become too defensive and that the Opposition do not crow too much, as I recall that when I was chairman of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body the Gurkhas were treated appallingly as a result of government policy. It was good to see the new Labour Government improve the Gurkhas’ pensions and the conditions for them and their families. Earlier, the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, mentioned Hong Kong. I was in Hong Kong just before the handover. The Gurkhas were extremely worried then about their and their families’ future. It is not surprising that many of them did not come here, because the conditions imposed were such that they were not encouraged to do so. I am delighted at the decision reached yesterday.

During this busy week the Prime Minister made a very welcome visit to our Armed Forces in Afghanistan. He then travelled to Pakistan. Certainly, Pakistan has to be at the centre of our attention regarding what we do in the future. I am not someone who believes everything I read in the press, rather the opposite, but I was somewhat concerned to read a little paragraph this morning which said that the Prime Minister had rejected the advice of the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State for Defence to send 2,000 more service personnel to Afghanistan. Instead, 700 will be sent on a temporary basis. It would be helpful if the Minister could comment on that.

I wish to concentrate on the enormous contribution that our Armed Forces have made to the interface with civilians not just in a peacekeeping role but in operational theatres. I have seen this for myself and have never failed to be amazed at the work that they do. Unlike people from other international organisations and, indeed, services, who stay safely in their vehicles, clearly marked with a big cross, or whatever, British troops are out on the street with civilians, talking to them and getting to know them. I was particularly struck by our troops’ attitude to women. When I went to the Balkans I coincidentally met some local women. I saw 18 year-old servicemen confidently talking to young women who were ignored by the men in their own community because they had been raped. It was an enormous privilege to observe those young soldiers comforting those women and their children.

In Afghanistan, General McColl and his soldiers protected women attending the Parliament. Now 25 per cent of its members are women. That is a substantial contribution to peacekeeping for which the British Armed Forces deserve credit. Anyone who meets them cannot fail to be impressed by them. However, words do not mean very much unless we do something. Following a service that was held in the abbey and a reception in the Palace of Westminster, I was surprised by how many Members of this House said, as if they were astonished, “Aren’t they wonderful?”. It was as if noble Lords were not fully aware of what our Armed Forces do. That leads me to the point made by my noble friend Lord Robertson about the disconnect. We have to do something about the disconnect between what we are trying to do in Afghanistan and, I hope, Pakistan, and how we get that across to the British population because they are not swinging around in support of it. That is understandable, but we have a responsibility in that area.

Much needs to be done and more resources are needed, but let us be objective in our debates, as this House is. Headley Court was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Sterling. How right he is. I was privileged to take members of the House of Lords Defence Group to visit Headley Court about 18 months ago. Headley Court’s limb provision had come from being appalling, relying on the National Health Service, to being the national winner of limb provision for service men and women who had lost arms or legs in the defence of this country. At the end of that enormously uplifting visit the Defence Group said as a whole that we were quite happy to support Headley Court, and we asked what it would like us to go back and lobby for or raise. The answer was that it did not want us to ask for anything because the money that it had asked to be spent on Headley Court had been spent, as we could see. That is an area of progress.

I certainly welcome the additional resources for Armed Forces housing in the Budget, and the improvements in pensions and medical services, although I exclude entirely the support for Armed Forces personnel with mental health problems. We really have to get to grips with that issue. Perhaps we need to discuss it more than we do.

I believe that our services are overstretched. The last Strategic Defence Review was absolutely first-class. I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, is in his place. I remember well not so much the debates but the consultation about it. It is easy to say that we need more resources. They may well come through a new Strategic Defence Review, which is direly needed now. If we had another, it could raise the issues and the challenge that we need more resources for our Armed Forces and the defence budget. I would support that. Where would the money come from? It would mean less for other areas. We need that debate, which will be helped by the more overt presence of our Armed Forces in our community, such as the marches when they come back. We can see how the general population respond to them. I very much welcome this debate and support entirely the call for a Strategic Defence Review. That will help us to take the necessary steps for our service men and women and their families, who deserve our support and without whom we could not do what we are trying to do.

My Lords, I must apologise to the House for the fact that you are about to hear a speech about the Gurkhas, because I was quite unaware of the wonderful events that were due to happen last night. I want to speak about them to urge on HMG to make a real reappraisal of their policy. I do so not only out of a profound admiration of and gratitude for the Gurkhas’ loyal and courageous service but also because it is in our national interest to encourage settlement of Gurkhas in this country and to use their skills, not least in the area of civil defence.

The Command Paper The Nation’s Commitment, presented by the Secretary of State for Defence in July last year, recognises that there is an important Armed Forces constituency and speaks rightly of the Government’s duty not to legislate without taking,

“account of the impact on the Armed Forces’ constituency and the strategic effect on the Armed Forces when making policies or considering legislative proposals”.

Have the Prime Minister and the Treasury remembered that? I think they need to do so before they take decisions on troops for Afghanistan, and I hope the defence chiefs will be listening.

Without 3,000 Gurkhas, we should have been in grave difficulty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder just how carefully the Government have considered the advantage to our defence capacity that would accrue from a Gurkha presence in this country. There are the obvious ones, such as their power to play a pivotal role in response to such emergencies as flooding, the foot and mouth crisis and in helping to sustain essential public services. They are disciplined, practical and could surely form the basis of a paramilitary territorial force to deal with major civil crises, including the protection of our trade on the high seas perhaps, leaving the regular military forces free to operate abroad. We are looking at a body of men who could join the police or work for the security contractors who work for the UK Border Agency. The recent Cabinet Office report, Security in a Global Hub, makes clear what an important area this is.

We must expect, very probably, a rather disturbed society for a time, thanks to the economic crisis. That may lead to civil unrest and encourage disruptive or violent elements, including disturbed, volatile and angry young men. We already have a relentless tide of immigrants without the skills that the Gurkhas have. Many of them will take time to assimilate to our society and way of life, if they ever do. They are likely to need more from the state than they contribute. The Gurkhas, Buddhists, will form an element of peaceful integration, rather than an alien culture wishing to impose its own laws. The Rights and Responsibilities paper from the Secretary of State for Justice recognises the possibility of that more volatile society. It states:

“Our country is changing and faces new and profound challenges. At such times, people need reassurance that the structures which support them in their daily lives are robust. They need to know that their liberty and freedoms are secure”.

The Gurkha community would make a positive contribution. They are disciplined, practical human beings, who will adjust to our society and form a stable element. They will be very employable. This country will be the loser if the Gurkhas are virtually excluded. We need them. I urge the Government to think again in the national interest. Why, indeed, are HMG ignoring the words in Command Paper 724, which expressly includes the Gurkhas under foreign and Commonwealth service personnel, recognises their unique circumstances and pledges action by the UK Border Agency? I believe that both honour and the nation’s interest require HMG to think again.

When I wrote this speech I thought that I only had four minutes—so noble Lords are spared much. But I would like to say, as I meant to say at the beginning of my speech, that we are all deeply indebted to the noble Lord, Lord King, for giving us this opportunity at a critical time. I am sure that the rest of the debate will be fascinating.

My Lords, it does not begin to do justice to the occasion to begin my speech with the customary reference to the pleasure that it gives me to follow my predecessor. It is a delight to welcome back to our debates my noble friend, who has just pleased us with her speech about the Gurkhas, which I hope will receive great consideration. Having sat next to my noble friend for the last 10 or 11 years, I never doubted her resolution to come back after her long and regrettable absence through disability. We welcome her very warmly.

There could hardly be a more timely moment for my noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater to have given us the opportunity for this debate. We are on the verge of completing our military withdrawal from Iraq, save for a few detachments. Our troops are coming back at the conclusion of a dangerous and difficult job, most professionally carried out, as has been so warmly acknowledged. I share that acknowledgement and gratitude.

For all our Armed Forces’ high reputation, I would, if I were the Defence Secretary, be a deeply troubled man, even if I had the experience and very great qualities of the present incumbent, who I happen to think is the best that this Government have produced. The Defence Secretary must often wish that he had half the number of infantry battalions as the battalions in which his sorrows come. A major concern of his surely will be for the well-being, safety and fair treatment of the young men and women who are committed to his charge in the Armed Forces. Across all three services—mainly, of course, in the Army—these young men and women are called on to place themselves potentially in the way of mortal danger, often in tours of duty that recur far too frequently, yet they have never let us down and their contribution has been immense.

I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, mentioned the Army in Northern Ireland. He spoke movingly of what it had to experience in Omagh. I was deeply grateful during my tenure there for the way in which the Army carried out its difficult and sophisticated tasks. In comparison with today’s challenges for the Armed Forces, it is worth noting that in Northern Ireland we never had to face a suicide bomber. The terrorists there were pretty keen to preserve their own skins. Alas, that is not true in the Middle East or in Afghanistan.

If the Defence Secretary is to do his duty by the Armed Forces, he must protect them from further deployments that involve overstretch and insufficient operational support. He must protect them from what I euphemistically call today the “pinch points in manning”, or the absence of proper numbers, which is what that really means in English, of skilled service people to fill important posts. That is experienced in all three services. He must also protect them from insufficient research into technology and into other areas on which future operational capabilities will depend. At the moment, all those things are brought about by a lack of resources. Stories of failure in those quarters are, unfortunately, legion and their effect on recruitment and retention are well known. They all derive from the old sin, committed by all Governments, of failing to match commitments to the resources that they are prepared to devote.

The Secretary of State also has to see that our forces are provided with what may be called a war aim that is defined clearly and convincingly and seen to be both worthy and winnable. Public support for what the forces are called on to do will always demand that, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, has frequently said. In the first Gulf War, the question that he was most frequently asked by soldiers was, “Is the country behind us?”. On that occasion they could be reassured about that, but these days, in my experience, there is far less assurance of it. The Government have much more to do before there is the same measure of support for our operations in Afghanistan. To put it bluntly, there is a feeling in the country that the war there against the Taliban is unwinnable and I would be surprised if that does not also find a place among some of our service people who so loyally conduct it.

Would it not have been far more realistic first to have secured Kabul as a firm base and then to have widened the hunt and sought to enlarge the footprint of the rule of law in Afghanistan? People have always been sceptical that sound, fully fledged democratic government can somehow gratefully spring forth, but that is what we seem to have hoped for. The Prime Minister’s Statement yesterday indicates that the Government know better now, which is welcome. I think that the Government are right in what they are seeking to achieve now, but it will take time to overturn the damage done to confidence, which is not good for the forces. The Government are right to perceive that the Taliban either will have to be defeated in the area of the country bordering Pakistan or will have to be defeated on the streets of Britain and so forth. Public scepticism has to be overturned.

It is not from any ghoulish desire on my part to pile Pelion upon the Ossa of the Secretary of State’s troubles but, out of sympathy for him, I end by referring to a very dark cloud indeed. In the light of the appalling state of public finances, he will have to fight some lonely battles in Cabinet for what he knows the forces need. That has been foreseen by other speakers today. Unless it is the Prime Minister himself, no colleague will stand up for him; they will all recite the mantra that, if they are to make sacrifices, the Defence Secretary must make them on an equal basis. That is not so. No other department’s sacrifices will foreseeably result in young men and women needlessly losing their lives while striving to make our country safe. He will have to stand and fight. If he goes down, he will know that he has done his duty; if he succeeds, the credit will extend not only to him but also to the Government of whom he is a part. I wish him well in that fight, which he will certainly have to wage.

My Lords, I echo the thanks to the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, for obtaining this important debate at this appropriate time. I also echo the pleasure that has been expressed at seeing the noble Baroness, Lady Park, in her place.

I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord King, should have talked about the contribution made by the Armed Forces to the defence of the United Kingdom and peacekeeping. I want to focus on the ability of the Armed Forces to make that contribution in the future. There is always a danger in looking back but my plea, which I shall end with, is based on three experiences on which I shall draw. I remind the House that we are debating this matter in a week in which we have had two important Statements, one on the reserves and one on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

My first experience may well be remembered by the noble Lord, Lord King. When the aircraft crashed at Lockerbie, the first people on the scene were the crew of a Territorial Army field ambulance. They were sent away by the police because no one knew what to do with them. One of my concerns about the reserves, which I hope will be put right as a result of the review, is that at last people will think through what the reserves represent in terms of skill and application, not just in the defence of the United Kingdom and in Iraq and Iran but also in the whole spectrum of peacekeeping, to which I want to move on.

My second experience was just before leaving the Army when I was sent out to look at the United Kingdom contingent with the peacekeeping operation in Cambodia. I was disturbed to find that the commander of that contingent had been issued with a Barclaycard and told to buy what the contingent needed in the markets of Phnom Penh. That seemed to me to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of what peacekeeping operations mean, particularly in a multinational organisation such as the United Nations. On complaining, I got my comeuppance, as the Secretary of State asked me to write a paper on the management of the United Kingdom contribution to UN operations, which led to my being asked to join a group under the command of the director-general of peacekeeping in the United Nations to consider the same in the whole context.

It was quite clear that the word “peacekeeping” covered a spectrum of activities, including conflict prevention, peacekeeping under Chapter 6 of the charter, peacemaking or peace enforcement under Chapter 7 and post-conflict reconstruction. All four matters were interlinked. What was peacekeeping in one place could actually be conflict prevention in another, as could post-conflict reconstruction. If all those were to be exercised, it was essential that there should be shown to be no disconnect, to use the word used by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, between the activities of the great offices of state in this country in deciding what the national contribution should be. That means the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and what was then the ODA and is now DfID.

Therefore, I was extremely concerned when I went to Afghanistan last year to find that there was a disconnect. The Foreign Office in Afghanistan appeared to have no link to the department run by DfID, which was sitting in a completely different building from the brigade commander. When I looked into the money available, I found that each American company commander sent to Afghanistan had not just $200,000 to spend on post-conflict reconstruction but the backing of the American Corps of Engineers. An Italian major had $2 million plus the help of the Italian Government and our brigade commander had $200,000 for the whole of Helmand, all controlled by DfID. I do not think that satisfactory peacekeeping is made unless there is a connect.

The third experience was a conversation that I had with the divisional commander who commanded the troops going into Iraq in 2003. I asked him after the event, “What was your battle-winning factor as far as equipment was concerned?”. He replied, “The American Marine Aircraft Wing, which was put under my command, because it had absolutely everything we needed for operations of this kind, virtually none of which was available from the Royal Air Force or the Army Air Corps”. That is a telling comment and it deserves deep examination. I entirely concur with the words of my noble and gallant friend Lord Bramall questioning the cost in the current defence budget of Trident, aircraft carriers, Astute submarines and eventually the Eurofighter, all of which are hideously expensive; they have a read-back to the Cold War and distort a budget based on operations that we are required to do today and tomorrow.

In this context and based on reflections on those three experiences, I echo the calls in this House today and previously for a serious defence review to examine the capability of our Armed Forces to contribute to not just the defence of the United Kingdom but also peacekeeping. The noble Lord, Lord King, quoted the late Prime Minister, saying that we must ask “What do we want to do?” and then fund it. The question “What do we want to do today and tomorrow?” has not been properly examined and the funding will be irrelevant unless it is based on an answer to that question.

Finally, because this is a debate about the Armed Forces’ contribution, as so many noble Lords have said, we must not forget that what is included in that funding is the all-important care and aftercare of all those young men and women whom we ask to carry out these operations on behalf of our great nation.

My Lords, it is indeed good to see the indestructible noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth, in her place. These debates are simply not the same without her. Like everybody else, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, for having introduced this debate and for the very reasonable, balanced and thoughtful contribution he made in opening it, which has set the tone for all our deliberations today. Of course he was right to emphasise the tribute which all of us should pay to the men and women of our armed services and to their families. I was especially glad that he remembered the wounded and maimed, who may never enjoy full health and 100 per cent physique again. I was particularly impressed by his telling references to mental illness, resulting from the experiences service people are expected to endure. It is too easy to sweep that under the carpet.

We owe it to all these people that our armed services are properly resourced, both in the numbers of people available to undertake a task and also the equipment at their disposal. None of us can have been happy with the Nimrod story or the stories about getting right the patrol vehicles our infantry are expected to use. I am glad it has been stressed in the debate that what is most important of all is that is absolutely clear to servicemen and women and their families what the objective of the engagement and the undertaking is. It must clearly be legally and morally justified. It is quite wrong to expect servicemen to undertake a task on our behalf unless we are certain that it is justified in international law and that it has the cause of morality fully behind it.

It is also important—again, we owe this to those involved—that we have thought through the implications and consequences of what we are doing. It is one thing to have the resources to fight the war, but the resources must be available to build the peace. Otherwise, we will have betrayed all those who have served and died in the cause. This brings us to the central issue of facing up to the real threat. It has been put that we must decide what we want to do and then make available what is necessary to do it. Of course I relate to that argument, but I remember thinking many years ago, when I had the privilege of being a service Minister, that it was important all the time to be clear about what the real existing and future threat is, and not be operating on what was appropriate for a threat which may no longer be relevant in the form it took in previous years.

When one is analysing that, one has to recognise that, characteristic of what we face, is the unorthodox nature of warfare now—although it has become so usual that it is probably not right to refer to it as unorthodox because, in a paradoxical sort of way, it has become the orthodox. In this our Special Forces are clearly particularly well designed to meet the needs that confront us. It is good to see that the Government are concentrating on the future of our Special Forces in the way our services are organised. It is also important to recognise, in this context, the contribution made by organisations such as the Royal Air Force Regiment or the distinguished Royal Marines. When I was the Minister responsible for the Navy—a privilege I have always greatly savoured and regarded myself as extremely fortunate to have had—I was never anything but inspired by the commitment and esprit de corps of the Royal Marines, who have been making a very important contribution. Then there are the reserves, and it is again good to see the way the Government are thinking through now how we need to integrate the reserves more completely in the total task in a way that is appropriate to the present situation.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, made some observations about the Royal Navy. I am not sure that I am totally with him in his doubts about carriers. It seems to me that, facing the kind of threat I described, carriers can be invaluable in enabling us to have flexibility and the ability to deploy our forces across the world. Where I think he is right is in questioning the whole context of the deterrent, a point also raised by the right reverend Prelate. I am not convinced that, with the pressures and demands being made on our fighting forces at present, we can see the renewal of Trident as an inescapable priority. That argument has not yet been proved.

Finally, in the nature of the task with which we are confronted, two things are true: the services are becoming more and more integrated, and increasingly we are required to operate in an international context. I would find it invaluable if, when my noble friend replies, she could tell us about how we are preparing our officers and men and women to serve in an international context and in an integrated context together with the other services. The quintessence of a high-flying officer today should be the ability to serve internationally but also to serve in the centre. I am sometimes a little fearful that we have not yet moved away from the tradition in which the person who has served in the centre comes back to their service as a bit suspect, with a doubt about how far they are really still part of the service, the Army, Navy or Air Force, to which their loyalty should be primary. Loyalty should be seen to the effectiveness of the integrated task.

The challenges are huge. All I can say is that we all owe a debt of gratitude to my noble friend and her colleagues for the tremendous responsibilities that they accept on our behalf.

My Lords, my noble friend’s powerful and authoritative opening speech has come in a debate that is particularly well timed. As our involvement in Iraq draws to a close, that in Afghanistan appears to be expanding. It seems to me that the lesson from Iraq is that although military intervention may be necessary, military occupation should if at all possible be avoided, and certainly be ended as early as possible. It is at last being recognised that Afghanistan is now a part of a far bigger problem: the survival of Pakistan as a democratic and secular state. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is a dangerous contradiction between the problem in Pakistan and the NATO military operations in Afghanistan. The NATO operations are clearly inciting the instabilities in Pakistan.

I read and reread the Prime Minister’s UK policy Statement on Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday. I fear that I found it a rather woolly, disconnected melange of military, political and social suggestions. The repeated emphasis on Britain's aid contribution to both countries made me wonder whether he had his priorities right. As my right honourable friend David Cameron said after the Statement:

“We are not in the business of trying to create a new Switzerland in the Hindu Kush”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/4/09; col. 873.]

My right honourable friend cited President Obama’s strategy:

“to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future”.

What a pity that we did not have such a crisp and clear statement from the Prime Minister.

In trying to influence what happens in Pakistan, the West is taking on a task of immense scale. The population is 174 million: double that of Iran and five times that of Iraq. A comparison with the population of Afghanistan is difficult because the Americans and the British disagree on the basic figure. The CIA says that it has 34 million people; the FCO says that it has 29 million—17 per cent difference. Perhaps the Minister will tell us who is right.

The deterioration in Afghanistan is epitomised by the recent agreement of President Karzai to introduce Sharia family law, with all its horrors for the treatment of women. Despite all the outrage from the West at that proposal, the best that the Prime Minister could report yesterday was to welcome Karzai’s “decision to review” that law. What sort of person are our troops being asked to lay down their lives for?

The Prime Minister has repeatedly said that we are fighting in Afghanistan to defend Britain. He emphasised yesterday:

“Two thirds of the attacks or plots in Britain come from Pakistan”.—[Official Report, Commons, 29/4/09; col. 875.]

The problem in Pakistan and Afghanistan is so vast in relation to our UK resources that I believe that we would defend ourselves more effectively if we focused more on the protection of our UK borders. We know that there are a very large number of persons of Pakistan origin living in the UK. Many of them have both British and Pakistan passports. They can therefore use their British passports to depart from and return to the UK and their Pakistan passports for travel outside the UK. The vast majority of these people are wholly loyal and are great contributors to our British community, but the fact is that we know that there are a few who are not, and it is extremely difficult to detect and monitor those few.

There is much literature on the internal threat in Britain. One of the best books remains The Islamist by Ed Hussein—I recommend it to any of your Lordships who have not read it. Quillam, the new counter-extremism think tank, is a valuable, although chilling, source of information. The real danger is the spread of Islamist and jihadist teaching through the madrassas, to the extent that they now provide most of the education for Pakistan’s poor. That is not a recent development. Many of those madrassas have been funded by Saudi Arabia. An excellent book, Three Cups of Tea, by two Americans, Greg Morteson and David Relin, sets out the evidence. To cite one excerpt:

“By December 2001 one of four major Wahabit proselytising organisations, the Al Haramain foundation, had built 1,100 mosques, schools and Islamic centres in Pakistan and other Muslim countries”.

Surely Saudi Arabia should be a key member of any alliance to combat the jihadist threats from inside Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Much could be done to strengthen our borders. I hope a new Government may consider whether we need a Department of Homeland Security on the American pattern, which might help to focus our efforts—and, indirectly, contribute to the effectiveness with which we can use our very limited military resources. I would really like that to start now; we cannot necessarily wait until we get a new Government.

I have two main complaints. First, despite new Labour's phrase “joined-up government”, there has been a lamentable lack of integration of our defence, foreign and homeland policies when tackling the threat from Islamism. It is high time that the policies and operations of DfID were far more integrated into the FCO—indeed, I wonder whether the time may not be approaching when DfID should be put back into the FCO. We need more joined-up thinking.

My second complaint is that our defence policy lacks the hard edge that enables our forces to be prepared for the real threats for which they are needed, rather than being allocated tasks on the basis of gesture politics. Nor am I sure that it is sensible to use special contingency reserves as the source of funding for special defence operations. That leads to huge inefficiencies, especially in procurement—referred to proudly by the Prime Minister yesterday when he spoke of the extra £1 billion that had been needed for emergency provision for vehicles in Afghanistan.

In conclusion, I fear that I must say that although the present Defence Secretary is one of the most distinguished members of the Government, I do not have confidence in the political direction of our national defence by our present Prime Minister. I believe that he has shown little interest in or understanding of the real needs of our Armed Forces.

My Lords, I, too, congratulate and thank the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, for calling this debate. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Judd, for his praise for the Royal Marines, which will be much appreciated in the corps.

Notwithstanding the criticisms made of the political lack of co-ordination and shortcomings in respect of the Allies’ endeavours in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there can be no doubt that our fighting troops have exceeded all our expectations in terms of courage, endurance and success. This is despite the great demands made on service manpower.

The make-up of the Helmand taskforce, which recently concluded its immensely successful deployment in Afghanistan, graphically illustrates the need for more infantrymen and commandos. The taskforce was commanded by, and under, the outstanding leadership of the able and experienced Brigadier Gordon Messenger. It was spearheaded by 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines. It is worth listing the taskforce formations: 400 royal naval ratings, the Royal Navy Sea King and Lynx squadron and the Royal Navy Harrier Strike Wing. There were also the following Royal Marine formations, other than 3 Commando Brigade Headquarters, to which I have already referred: 42 Commando, 45 Commando, the Commando Logistics Regiment, the Armoured Support Group, the UK Landing Force Command Support Group with the Commando Brigade Reconnaissance Force, 539 Assault Squadron Royal Marines, and 18 members of the Royal Marines Band Service. From the Army, there was invaluable support from 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery, 24 Commando Regiment Royal Engineers, 1 Rifles, 1 and 2 The Prince of Wales’s Royal Regiment, 1 The Queen’s Dragoon Guards and last, but certainly not least, 2 Battalion Royal Gurkhas, as well as other international elements.

This was a truly combined operation. All ranks and formations exceeded, as I have said, our highest expectations in them, with many ranks from all formations having already deployed to Afghanistan on a number of previous occasions. It is worth noting the high proportion of naval service in this deployment. I remind the House—this has been referred to by other noble Lords—that tragically this seven-month deployment resulted in 31 deaths on active service, together with 354 total recorded injuries, including 22 very seriously injured and 14 seriously injured. Were it not for the miracles of modern medicine—I pay tribute to the wonderful work of the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force medical teams—there would have been many more deaths.

In the seven-month deployment, the commando brigade and its attached ranks have seen combat of a ferocity that has not been witnessed since World War 2. Our Armed Forces now have greater battle experience than at any time since the war. We owe them, and their families, a debt of honour and gratitude which we can never repay. It is also interesting to note that the Gurkhas are, as always, playing their crucial role in this war, as they have done for centuries, in support of Great Britain. The Minister will note that, of the 31 deaths on active service to which I have referred, two were members of the Royal Gurkhas, and a number of Gurkhas were wounded. The Government must now honour yesterday’s vote in the other place. Their churlish position on this matter is an outrageous insult to our most loyal and brave friends.

Our operations in Afghanistan are crucial. Nevertheless, it is equally important that our Armed Forces retain the basic skills and capability to conduct their operations. We are likely to be in Afghanistan at least until 2015 and probably longer. It is essential that our Armed Forces have the opportunity to exercise the other skills in which they are also held internationally in the highest regard. The next war or humanitarian operation that they will be asked to fight or conduct will no doubt be different from what has happened in the past. We have always to be ready for the unexpected. An outbreak of piracy off the coast of east Africa means that we are in desperate need of frigates.

In order to maximise the political choices available to the Government, it is crucial that our expeditionary capability is not only maintained but practised. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, is quite right; we need the two new aircraft carriers, one at sea and one in refit, as soon as possible. There should be no brakes put on this programme, nor any brakes put on the Joint Strike Fighter, which, in any event, is unlikely to come into service before 2016. I understand that the first steel is being cut in Govan on 7 July 2009. These ships will be needed fast and the Government should endeavour to bring forward the delivery dates for the Joint Strike Fighters.

I am continually told by serving troops that the kit is good. However, they need more helicopters, especially military and heavy lift. This demand has frequently been made from opposition Benches in this House. When she winds up, will the Minister explain to the House the likely delivery dates for more helicopters?

Finally, on the matter of manpower, our Royal Marines and soldiers, with limited numbers, are doing far more tours on active service than should reasonably be asked of them. They joined to fight; morale, I understand, is high. We need more troops. I suspect that the Army needs at least another infantry brigade with supporting arms and the Royal Marines need another commando unit. If the Government wish to expand Special Forces, we need a larger pool. That means more infantrymen and more commandos. Recruiting and retention are reasonably satisfactory. The Government should take the initiative and increase the size of the Army and Royal Marines so that our Armed Forces can more easily match the great demands that we make of them.

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord King, for this opportunity to debate the contribution made by our Armed Forces. Amid all their incredible achievements, however, I find it very sad that, all too often, the media tend to focus on the problem areas, be it Chinook supply, ship supply or the casualties of which we hear too many in this House. All of it must have a desperate effect on morale and recruiting.

I wish to focus on the training and equipment, without which our Armed Forces would be unable to contribute either to our defence or our peacekeeping tasks. I agree with many other noble Lords, as was said already today, that the time has come for another review. I hope it will include the provision of sufficient and suitable aircraft, particularly helicopters, and, more importantly, with spares to keep them flying, so that, in training and in war, we can have full equipment.

Defence funding peaked in the 1950s, 1960s and in the mid-1980s, all Cold War periods. It has declined since. Our warfare methods have changed from European planes with large formations of tanks. Although the Cold War may have ended, we are now fighting a less conventional war in more difficult terrain. We should have sufficient spending for proper equipment for training and for war. The time has come for another peak in spending.

Training for war needs realistic scenarios and, therefore, natural terrain. At this point, I should declare an interest; I am involved with the Ministry of Defence in the provision of land for training. Pressures have increased on traditional areas such as Salisbury Plain and Wales, particularly with troops returning from Germany. In the United Kingdom, Scotland has now become the largest formation training area, providing an ideal mix of ground and realistic training scenarios. In many places, this is a combination of Forestry Commission land, private land and Ministry of Defence land.

It has recently been estimated that approximately 70 per cent of this training is carried out on private land and Forestry Commission land. Until devolution, a licence existed between the Forestry Commission and the Ministry of Defence on a 30-year rotational lease. In the next three to five years, this licence is due to expire, and although the security of tenure will exist in England and Wales, the Forestry Commission in Scotland is now under the management of the Scottish Government. Can the Minister say whether the Government have contemplated the effects of the Scottish Government withdrawing this licence, particularly on the areas around the Dundrennan and Dalbeattie training centres, which rely so extensively on the Galloway forest? Without private and Forestry Commission land, UK large formation training costs will increase dramatically because such training would be forced overseas. All this takes tight, efficient and careful management.

Currently, the majority of Scotland’s training ground is run by regional forces through the 2nd Division, which is based in Edinburgh. A review is under way whereby this responsibility may be taken over by defence training estates. The 2nd Division controls and liaises on personal contact with the civilian population and helps considerably in conflict resolution. Defence training estates would be likely to regionalise this procedure based on Ministry of Defence centres reporting to a headquarters in Wiltshire. I should like to raise a slight caution here; namely, that this may lead to a loss of community confidence and withdrawal of this asset.

Our forces undertake a remarkable job on our behalf. The Government should not forget that training is as important as fighting and that they should supply full equipment for both—in particular, the now essential helicopters. The Cold War was funded properly. The theatre may now have changed, but the need for funding has not.

My Lords, I strongly welcome the opportunity to debate this vital issue, as we are currently a nation undertaking two medium-sized conflicts on a peacetime budget of just 2.5 per cent of GDP. At the outset, I state that as a Muslim leader I totally condemn the appalling protests against our servicemen by a small group of misled persons when our troops returned home to Luton last month. A fundamental distinction is to be made between the politicians who commit to war and the Armed Forces whose role it is to execute their will. It is therefore unacceptable to make political points to soldiers. Such points should be directed in a peaceful and non-offensive manner towards politicians.

The UK is fortunate to have an apolitical military, which is not a political force in its own right. We must defend against any politicising of the Armed Forces. I am proud to say that my father and members of my family fought in two world wars. My uncle served in the King’s African Rifles, as did the noble Lord, Lord King, who served as an officer.

The military exists to execute the defence of this country according to the direction of the Government. Thus there must be a reciprocal relationship between politicians and servicemen. They are not allowed to go on strike or to join a trade union. Therefore, in return, we owe them a duty of care. For the Armed Forces to do their job, they and their families must be properly respected, equipped, resourced and looked after in the field and at home by us as political masters. Yet this pact or military covenant has not been properly honoured in the past decade, as the Ministry of Defence admits. It has said that our servicemen are continuing,

“to operate above the overall level of concurrent operations which the Armed Forces are structured and resourced to sustain over”,

time. Following an inquest, the deputy coroner of Oxfordshire has said that the Ministry of Defence should hang its head in shame.

Afghanistan demonstrates with terrifying clarity how overstretched we are. It is imperative for us to ensure that any involvement or commitment overseas must be matched by an adequate size of our Armed Forces, which need to be suitably equipped and resourced. Will the Government therefore reassure the House that any troop increases in Afghanistan will be matched by a proportionate increase in equipment, especially in suitable armoured vehicles and helicopters? I applaud the £700 million increase in funding for new armoured vehicles for Afghanistan to replace the Snatch vehicles, which have inadequate resistance to roadside bombs. Will the Minister therefore give the House a date when all the new 700 armoured Vixen vehicles should be on the ground? Will she also give an update on the delivery of the new Warthog armoured track vehicle? I have concerns that these government commitments are not reaching the front line fast enough.

The troops on the ground rely on being able to get out to the theatres of conflict easily and quickly. However, only 44 per cent of the TriStar fleet which is responsible for getting the troops from the UK to Afghanistan is considered fit for purpose, which adversely affects troop logistics, transport conditions and leave time. What are the Government doing to ensure that we have adequate transport capacity between the UK and Afghanistan?

In Afghanistan, there is a need for flexible troop transport planes, yet we are seriously short of Hercules and C-17s. Furthermore, we now hear that the replacement of the A400M transport aircraft will not be with us until 2011, having been subjected to a four-year delay. What options have the Government considered for buying or leasing more troop transport aircraft? Furthermore, what discussions has the MoD had with the contractors and Airbus Military on the viability of the A400M project and on when we can expect a final decision?

There are also important political issues which we must work through. The Afghanistan mission is being undertaken under the banner of NATO, but the troop contributions mainly come from the US, the UK, Canada and Poland. I welcome the increase in troop and police training additions pledged by Germany, Spain and France, but what further pressure are the Government applying to our NATO allies to ensure further long-term troop deployments? It is vital that everyone carries their weight in the NATO alliance, as the security of Afghanistan is vital for our security. In addition to taking military action it is important that we win the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan, and build their institutions and infrastructure to achieve long-term peace. We should not be fighting there for a long time.

The security of Afghanistan and Pakistan is closely linked. Therefore, what work are the Government undertaking with the Pakistani military and the ISI to bolster military capability and aid their defensive strategy? What steps are being taken towards promoting good governance and joint working between the MoD, the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development at local and district levels in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the stable blocks for regional and world peace?

It is vital that our servicemen are treated fairly and with compassion, which requires a holistic approach that encompasses a true duty of care both in the field and when they return home. On their return, it is important that our servicemen are looked after in every possible way to ensure their welfare and well-being, as well as the welfare of their families. It is essential that we provide them with financial, material, medical and psychological support. We owe it to them. Finally, I urge the Government to consider all the points raised in this wide-ranging debate. We must take stock of where we are and where we need to be heading.

My Lords, we are all extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord King, for giving us the opportunity to have this debate and, not least, for the usual balanced, thoughtful and comprehensive way in which he made his remarks. I should like to echo just about everything that he had to say.

I am delighted to see that great patriot the noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth, in her place. We have missed her greatly. Privately, I have always thought that she would have made a marvellous Formula 1 driver. Seeing her manoeuvre her new vehicle around your Lordships’ premises today has only confirmed me in that belief.

On a more sober note, I echo the words of my noble friend Lady Dean about what is happening in Basra today. Any of us who saw that service must have been deeply moved by it. It brings home to us in the most vivid way exactly what sacrifices our young men and women are making on our behalf.

I turn to the problems facing the Ministry of Defence. I was extremely pleased to hear the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, say that the present Secretary of State was the best that we have had in this Government. I dare not comment on that, even though my previous boss is not in the Chamber, but I will say that in the 40 years since I have been at Westminster the present Secretary of State is only the second I knew who wanted the job. He is the first one who knew anything about it before he got there, as far as I can make out. He is doing a superb job. That is enough sucking up for one day.

The noble Baroness, Lady Park, said that she had various uses for the Gurkhas. She omitted one that it always occurred to me we should have contemplated: sending them to Northern Ireland. We would have had little trouble with the IRA within 48 hours of their arriving there, but that is a purely personal view.

It was interesting today to listen to the generals, neither of whom is in his place at the moment, and one field marshal telling us why they wanted all the Navy assets cut for more expenditure on the Army, although they were too delicate to put it so crudely. I do not agree. If we are going to have carriers, we need two; one is no use at all, as what would we do when one is out of action?

I am a firm believer in having a four-boat Trident fleet, even though we are told that the new submarines are going to be much more effective and efficient than the generation that they are replacing. We have come more than once close to the edge of not having a boat on patrol, even with the present Vanguard class.

I am a firm believer in the nuclear deterrent. I took on board the remarks of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark, who said that he did not believe that this country should have nuclear weapons and that we should set a moral example to the rest of the world by giving them up. The great thing about nuclear weapons is that they are not only the ultimate war-making weapon but the ultimate peacekeeping weapon. That is their great virtue: they act as a superb and ultimate deterrent. I will never cease to battle to make sure that this country keeps its nuclear deterrent in good fighting order.

I think that we could redirect some of our resources quite drastically in the defence equipment budget, although my candidates would be some of the expenditure in the Royal Air Force, where we are committed. One has to recognise the extent to which Defence Procurement Ministers are prisoners of the past and of political decisions of which they themselves had no part. We are now spending huge amounts of money on a fourth generation aircraft when the fifth generation aircraft, the Joint Strike Fighter, will be available to us in a short space of time.

We need to remember that we want our Armed Forces not just for peacekeeping and dealing with insurgencies; they have to be there in case we need them for serious war fighting. To that end, some of the kit that we are procuring will not be much use to us in 10 or so years’ time, as other countries acquire fifth-generation aircraft. The most important thing when we are talking about serious war fighting is the need for this country to maintain its capability to communicate in the battle space with the forces of the United States of America. We are close to losing that capability and there is no other member of NATO, so far as I am aware, that has it. I consider that of supreme importance to the defence posture of this country.

Parenthetically, I want to say how much I welcome the Secretary of State’s renewed emphasis on the Special Forces and his intention to deliver some resources to increasing their size and capability.

My noble friend Lady Dean said that of course we need to spend more on defence. I could not agree more. Over a few years we should increase our defence expenditure by the tune of something like 25 per cent. She also said that something would have to give way. I disagree with her profoundly on that. When we see how many resources we are finding to bail out incompetent and greedy bankers—that is a serious remark; it is not intended as a jest—I see no reason why we cannot find the resources for the Armed Forces, particularly when we are in a time of increasing unemployment and the resources are available. We owe it to our Armed Forces. It is a question of political courage. I hope that my noble friends in my Government or any successor Government will make the resources available to the Armed Forces, which we so easily could do.

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater for introducing the debate. I remind the House of my interest as an infrequently serving TA officer.

Before getting into my main speech, I would like to pick up on the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, about Special Forces. The simple fact is that only a small proportion of our Armed Forces are suitable for Special Forces, whose skill set is so remarkable. It is also worth remembering that, by the standards of many countries, our Royal Marines Commandos are Special Forces.

Yesterday’s policy Statement about Afghanistan and Pakistan was interesting. There was some recognition that the operation is not purely military, but we are not pulling all the levers of the state’s power, both hard and soft, in unison. Apart from the Prime Minister himself, there is no single Minister who can wield that power. The power is diluted and divided and no one controls the money. The Statement said that the number of civilian experts in Afghanistan was to be doubled. Will the Minister say what the new total will be? That is the only question that I am going to ask.

Many noble Lords have queried whether our Armed Forces are properly equipped. In effect, have we got our threat assessment wrong and, from that, our capability management? I am not sure that we have got it that wrong. The problem lies with the strategic decisions that we have made: first, operating at double medium- scale plus when only resourced for one medium-scale operation and one small operation; and, secondly, the way in which we are prosecuting the campaign in Afghanistan. On that, I will be building on the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. As for Iraq, I look forward to the conclusions of the inquiry into that campaign, which will start at some point.

Despite the Government’s protestations, our operations on the ground in Afghanistan are primarily military in nature. Moreover, there is insufficient density of military and security staff in the difficult provinces. ISAF does not compare well to IFOR in that respect. Another difficulty is that many of ISAF’s troops are located in the quiet areas and operate under significant national caveats. This also gives weight to a Taliban argument that ISAF is merely a western force of occupation.

As many noble Lords have observed, members of our Armed Forces have been prosecuting the campaign in Afghanistan with vigour and courage. They are in contact with the Taliban on a daily basis. Inevitably there can be loss of civilian life and damage to civilian infrastructure but, unlike with the Americans, reconstruction for us does not start the next day. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, explained some of these difficulties with far more authenticity and credibility than I can manage. But often the area of operations is too dangerous for conventional NGOs, and DfID does not do danger, as it appears to see itself as not having a tactical role. Thus, we can have only military and not civil effect. I am not sure how we are going to change an adverse civil culture by purely military means.

Yesterday, the Government released their policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The policy observed that most Afghans do not support the Taliban but are waiting to see who predominates. Nevertheless, they also have a cultural position. The policy paper alluded to a decisive blow against the Taliban. I think that that is illusory and there will not be one. We need to drive a wedge between the reconcilable and the irreconcilable Taliban, which has been the policy for some time. Effective reconstruction and its delivery are crucial to this, but we must also recognise and understand the cultural issues.

For instance, one of our objectives in Afghanistan is to empower women, which is an absolutely proper and desirable objective. But how does that fit in with the Afghan culture and do we understand it? Out of 8,000 12 year-old English girls, one will die from childbearing-related complications. We could do better because the figure in Sweden is one in 17,000. However, in developing countries the ratio is one in 450 and in Afghanistan it is one in nine. I repeat: one in nine Afghan women will die as the result of childbearing problems. On top of that, two in every 10 Afghan babies die before their fifth birthday. The figures are horrendous and hard to comprehend; indeed, only two other countries in the world have a worse record. However, it is not just poverty. As many noble Lords know, Afghanistan has very few proper midwives or decent facilities, but we know too that the culture is very complex and we do not fully understand it.

When our troops deploy to theatre, they undertake pre-deployment training and study the culture, but only enough for a six-month tour. Apparently, Afghan men are very poor at permitting and facilitating medical intervention into their wives’ pregnancies or deliveries and they would certainly never allow a male doctor to attend. They will not relent even if their wives suffer diabolical pain or injury, or even if she bleeds to death over two days. It is very hard for us to understand why they allow such suffering, but I am afraid that it is in their culture. If we are honest, until recently the UK was a bit homophobic, but the Government changed our culture by a number of means. They did it slowly, but we have changed.

When I came back from Afghanistan two years ago, having been there with the noble Viscount, Lord Slim, I came to the view that we need either a hardened and well financed NGO or something much more akin to the old ODA of the early 1990s. It could come under either the MoD or the FCO, but in both cases it would work closely with our military at the tactical level. It would have integrated communications and individuals would be trained to have good operational skills. They would need to be able to marshal a military helicopter to an emergency landing site. But what is most important is that they would have to be prepared to accept enhanced risk and deal with danger. There is no point in taking a steady stream of military casualties and not achieving our desired end state, or to do it so slowly that it does not matter. The mission would be to provide civil effect in order to encourage local Afghans to reject the Taliban and move towards a more prosperous and healthy Afghanistan. I do not think that this is a role for the Territorial Army, but if we continue to prosecute the campaign as a purely military one, we are unlikely to achieve the desired end state.

My Lords, I, too, should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, for securing this important debate and I also thank my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham and other noble Lords who have raised the importance of the care and aftercare of service personnel. I declare an interest in that I am a non-executive director of the Order of St John and the British Red Cross Defence Medical Welfare Service. The contribution of the Defence Medical Welfare Service is not well known. Its welfare officers go about their work in a quiet and effective way in hospitals in the United Kingdom, Germany and Cyprus and on deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, we believe that it is far more important that the people who need and use the service, members of the Armed Forces and their dependent relatives, know exactly what DMWS provides. Feedback from them and the commanding officers of those hospitals is overwhelmingly positive.

The Defence Medical Welfare Service is a charity contracted and funded by the MoD to provide a medical welfare service to hospitalised personnel and their dependent relatives. The service is held to account by the MoD at quarterly review meetings. We are the only civilian charity that serves on the front line and is accountable to military command while on deployment attached to field hospitals. Before deployment, all welfare officers undergo specialist training and, immediately prior to leaving, join the hospital medical team with which they will be working for last-minute training. While on deployment, they wear a functional uniform that differentiates them from the military and a name badge carrying the logo of St John and the British Red Cross.

The money invested by the MoD into DMWS is used in as cost-effective a way as possible and is subject to regular monitoring by the board, the management team and, of course, the MoD. A rigorous performance management framework enables anyone from the board to the welfare officers to see at a glance what activity has taken place in the units. However, what is not seen in those reports, but is seen only in the letters of thanks and appreciation, is how the welfare officers rise on every occasion to meet needs on an individual basis with professionalism, compassion and respect to assist those at a most vulnerable time in their lives. Personnel from other than UK units who are treated by the hospital team are also recipients of DMWS; in fact a letter recently arrived from the head of the army in the Netherlands praising the way in which Dutch personnel had been so well cared for by DMWS welfare officers.

Much has been discussed over the last 18 months on the subject of the broader provision of welfare to the Armed Forces—not only the military but also other organisations. However, the service that DMWS provides is different in that it is purely a hospital-based medical welfare service. What do we mean by this? All welfare officers hold a qualification in health and/or welfare, including counselling skills and first aid as basic requirements, as well as being given the opportunity for continuing professional development. They are fully equipped to meet the immediate needs of the sick and injured by providing the basic necessities of clothes and toiletries as well as comforts for those requiring longer stays in the form of CDs and DVDs. They also provide intensive support for the families of the injured.

Perhaps the most important part is the listening ear for hospitalised personnel, enabling them to talk in absolute confidence away from but respecting the chain of command. They often want to share their personal worries, anxieties and fears, as well as grief if perhaps they have lost a great chum. There is also an opportunity to pick up on the early signs of mental health conditions, particularly those that lead to PTSD. This can lead to early referral and prophylactic treatment. This listening ear is also available to medical support teams, most often after a very heavy day of casualties and deaths, providing a private space for reflection and the ability to unwind from the stress of the day.

This organisation, consisting of a total of 50 staff, provides a small part of the total welfare commitment to service personnel, but we believe that the delivery of medical welfare plays a very important part in providing a professional and compassionate service at times of greatest need and, in so doing, contributes to the well-being of individual service personnel, enabling them to move towards a full recovery and, where possible, to return to service duties.

I hope that the Minister, in her winding-up, will be able to give me some information as to when the commitments in the Command Paper published last July will be enacted.

My Lords, I would like to breach the conventions of your Lordships’ House by thanking my noble friend Lord King, who I am afraid is not in his place; perhaps he heard that I was going to speak. I and your Lordships owe him a colossal debt for giving us the opportunity to have a debate on the Armed Forces today, when we have heard so much in your Lordships’ House and elsewhere this week about the huge spread of activities and duties of our enormously brave, successful and unique Armed Forces all over the world.

I shall be impudent again. It is 66 years and three days since I lost my father. He was classified as a noble and gallant Lord—if your Lordships’ want to find out why, they should go to the end of the Royal Gallery— although he did not achieve high office. From the age of four I was imbued with something like military duty, if not quite that. I am old enough to be one of, I think, four speakers in the debate today who are conscripts. There may be more and certainly others may have started as conscripts and then continued to distinguished regular professional careers. As far as I am aware, four of your Lordships who have spoken in this debate have served full-time as professional soldiers or perhaps sailors, so here we can see an enormous spread of the Armed Forces’ military duties.

I served two years in my father’s regiment. Being, as Hilaire Belloc put it, somewhat short of sight, and what is called vertically challenged, my commanding officer decided that it might be better if I were not on the Queen’s Birthday Parade on 13 July 1958. Instead, I was sent to the small arms school for weapons training in infantry weapons at Hythe. Being somewhat short of sight, I borrowed the glasses of a kind Welsh Guards colleague and stunned the staff by achieving 94 out of 100. It may considerably shake up some of my colleagues, not least the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, to know that we were the first course to use the new self-loading rifle—the .300 SLR. I thought this was a Mercedes sports racing car but was told that it was not. That was 51 years ago today. There was I, a young second lieutenant, taking that two-month course in weapons training.

On 14 July 1958 the grins were wiped off our faces. At Windsor, 1 Battalion Scots Guards were dressed in public service tunics and bearskins and marching with pipers to Windsor Castle perhaps every 48 hours. We were warned for duty in—guess where—Iraq. I was allowed by the late father of my noble friend Lord Cathcart to be in charge of the entire weapons training for my battalion. As a 19-year-old, that really shook me but I realised I had to do a professional job. There is one thing that I ask—please—the Minister to do. She knows that I have the good luck to be secretary of the House of Lords defence group. Alas the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, is not in her place, but one of my colleagues—I will not say where or who—made a reference and comparison involving her as chairman of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body, Attila the Hun and a pussycat. I will leave your Lordships to draw the necessary conclusion. She is simply a wonderful chairman of our group, we are grateful to have her and she leads me and other noble Lords to learn, visit, see and discover all aspects that concern servicemen and servicewomen.

I will lightly and quietly breach one more convention of your Lordships’ House. Among the speakers who alas are not in their places is a young colleague in my regiment, the noble Earl, Lord Stair. I am thinking of 13 June 1982, when he led his platoon from 2 Battalion Scots Guards at Mount Tumbledown in the Falkland Islands against the fifth battalion of the Argentine marines. He and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, might well be the only two Members speaking in the debate—there might be more— who have faced enemy action and hostile fire; we are lucky to have them. It is with that in mind that I hope the Minister will be able to reassure me today or later that the standard of training that the noble Earl, the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, others and I received will continue.

I see that I have about one minute left. Your Lordships have been kind enough to refer—I would like to join in the tributes—to my noble friend Lady Park, who has been an enormous help to me. I served in Northern Ireland for five and a half years—six summers, I will call it—and my boss was the then Secretary of State, the institutor of today’s debate, my noble friend Lord King. One evening in August 1987 he had been staying with me. He moved to Tullybeagles in Perthshire where he was called from his bed at four o’clock in the morning because he had to fly across to Belfast and on to the hideous attack at Ballygawly. I cannot remember how many light infantrymen lost their lives. In April 1988 my noble friend had to fly once again to Belfast following the appalling murder of two corporals who were trapped in west Belfast. I happened to be 500 yards away—little further than we are from the other place. There was a helicopter flying above my head; I happened to be the duty Minister but that was nothing to do with me. I was pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, referred to what he had seen at Omagh. The fighting that our wonderful servicepeople carry out in Afghanistan or in areas of conflict is no less important and no less vicious than what he saw in Omagh and what my noble friend Lord King and I saw and appreciated on other occasions in Northern Ireland.

I conclude by thanking my noble friend Lord King for giving us the opportunity to speak today and praise each and every member of our Armed Forces. I apologise for taking a slightly personal view but I am a mere second lieutenant among noble and gallant Lords, including marshals of the Royal Air Force, and others who have spoken. It is crucial that even a mere timid, vertically challenged platoon commander of the Scots Guards should also be heard.

My Lords, events in life can give rise to great emotions, and this is one of those days. As I stood with my wife this morning watching the services in Basra I felt that welling-up of sadness that almost leads to a tear in the eye. That, like the “Last Post”, is a sad moment. Then there is another welling-up, which is when the pride takes over. As I look around at this country I see that there is a reason for great pride in our Armed Forces. They are probably the most respected institution that we have in the world at this moment—they are respected worldwide. It is sad that the Bank of England has gone downhill and that Parliament and the Government are no longer respected. But pound for pound, dollar for dollar, euro for euro, those men and women and what they represent are worth more than any others in the world. What they do today is often a result of history. What they have done has sometimes been due to the mistakes of others but very seldom has it been due to their own mistakes.

One has to think now about the future. Over the past few weeks I have been writing a Green Paper. I like those sorts of things; you take useless information, put it all together and draw conclusions that you know no one else would ever accept. So I began with Her Majesty the Queen and her Crown dependencies, overseas territories and realms—three countries, 12 countries, 15 countries. Then I took the Commonwealth, 65 countries that are British-related and, to some extent, interrelated. You might say, “Well, what about these countries?”. But you do not look at their population; you look at their coastlines, 44,000 kilometres of them—our territories. That is a little more, by a few hundred kilometres, than the territory of the Soviet Union, and twice that of the United States.

You then say, “Let’s look at the oceans of the world and these coastlines and what they represent”. The coastline around the Pacific measures 136,000 kilometres; around the Indian Ocean, 111,000 kilometres; and around the Mediterranean, 87,000 kilometres. You say, “What does that all mean?”. You go back into your history and say, “Why on earth did we go out into the world?”. We have never been an exporting nation; we have always been an importing nation. The role of the Navy has been to protect our lives by protecting our imports. Thus, the future of our island, which was once known by the ancients as “Windmill Hill” because we worshipped the wind, is to go out and invest, develop and bring back some of the benefits from around the world.

Looking at the food crisis and at the dependent territories and others, you realise that almost all those who are in trouble had investment in development that took place because of what they had to offer and the added value that could be created. So I thought that we must look not only at the added value on the land but at the added value in the sea and what lies under it. I thought that for these territories the Government should immediately declare 500-mile limits over the oceans, or at least a limit of half the distance between the island and the next mainland, that we should then protect. The problem for the world and the defence of world peace does not necessarily lie inland; it depends upon access by sea. Inevitably, having served in the Royal Navy, I would expect this to be the Navy’s prime role. Can we defend the sea routes? Can we, effectively, have access? Access for defence or peacekeeping purposes is difficult on lands that are not linked to the coast.

Of course we need the new carriers. We need other resources too, but some of them are relatively simple. Having had to serve in patrols in Cyprus where you were in inshore or coastal minesweepers that made you sick, you suddenly realise that for patrol boats in some of these territories you do not need anything much bigger than a large motor gunboat with a 40-millimetre Bofors and what they now call a chain gun.

I was thinking of how we could defend these territories. Your Lordships will remember that there are now 45 claims to the Antarctic, because of the natural resources that are underneath it. When the Russians go and stick a flag somewhere, that is them laying a claim. We should give consideration to the resources of the sea. If I were like the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, with his ships and his lateral-thinking mind, I would say, “Maybe, if we take these territorial rights, we can sell certain oil rights and other rights, which could raise significant funds that could finance further developments”.

These are just slightly lateral thoughts, but if we are to have a future as a nation, it will be trade-related. We have an enormous manufacturing balance-of-payments deficit, but we have a great opportunity at the moment. The biggest single growth area of GDP, surprisingly enough, is the health service. The public sector is what it is all about today, and that is wrong. If unemployment is rising and we need to stimulate demand, let us not give people £2,000 to scrap an old car; let us spend a bit more of the reserves on creating forces. Let us not just train university students in boats on the Thames; let us put them together and send them out in gunboats. After all, I went to sea as an officer in the Navy after only 90 days’ basic training, which I think was due to a technological error.

I have great respect for many people who have taken part in this stimulating debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Park, who is sitting there as the leading member of the household cavalry in your Lordships’ House at the moment, creates emotions in me: sadness because she was not here for a while, but great pride that she is here now.

There is much that we can learn from history. I have already been forced to learn it. When you are in trade, you sit below the salt; you go to the more difficult countries and deal with the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean—all parts of the world that no one wants to go to because they are hot and dusty. Then, suddenly, you find that that is where the conflict is. The conflict is not in the Channel or in the western approaches; there are both conflicts and opportunities throughout the world, and we, the United Kingdom, have the greatest opportunity that we have had in my lifetime.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, if I may interrupt the debate, it may be for the benefit of the House for me to inform noble Lords that, as the House has had the opportunity to debate the update on Gurkhas during Questions, the usual channels have now agreed not to repeat the Statement on Gurkhas in this House. Therefore, my noble friend Lord Malloch-Brown will repeat the Statement on Sri Lanka at the conclusion of this debate.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord King, on securing this debate. Listening to today’s debate and reading carefully the Hansard of the debate on defence procurement that was held in the other place about 10 days ago, I acknowledge and appreciate the growing consensus across political parties on the whole question of defence. There is an increasing consensus that our force is severely overstretched; that there is a near impossibility, or a considerable unlikelihood, of us going to war alone in the future; that we are more likely to be part of a coalition, part of a UN force or part of peacekeeping operations; that our economic situation at present puts us under severe pressure; that we need—virtually all noble Lords who have spoken have referred to this—a major strategic defence review; and that we must match our commitments to our resources.

Where I slightly question what the noble Lord, Lord King, and some of my noble colleagues have been saying, however, is on the issue of whether we are prepared as a country to provide the resources for Britain to remain as a first-division power, or whether we have to accept the reality of our economic circumstances and accept that we are likely to be a very superior second-division power. On the one hand, we have at present what I would describe as first-division weaponry and equipment. We have Trident and the Typhoon, while soon we will have the Astute submarines. Two supercarriers have been ordered, and we have the outstanding Type 45 Daring class destroyers. That is first-class equipment. On the other hand, though, we have a shortage of troops, of helicopters—as my noble friend Lord Burnett referred to—and strategic lift capability, as well as a shortage of escort vessels, which the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, referred to.

Unquestionably, we are trying to do too much on the 2.4 per cent or so of gross domestic product spent on defence. Whichever party wins the next general election will face some difficult choices. Indeed, I think I am right in saying that the Official Opposition have for the first time acknowledged that the defence spend, as far as they are concerned, can no longer be regarded as a sacred cow and ring-fenced. Indeed, I would suggest that the debate on defence in the Conservative Party in the next 12 or 18 months will be crucial to defence in this country.

Of course, it would all be very different if we currently faced a major military threat. We would then have to put defence expenditure as a number one priority. However, this is not the case at present. On the other hand, we have a major conflict in Afghanistan, commitments in the Balkans and piracy off Somalia, all of which have to be properly resourced. It is particularly disturbing to hear that the Prime Minister is blocking the commitment, or the wish of the defence chiefs, to provide more permanent forces for Afghanistan and that he will sanction only a modest increase on a temporary basis. I think that we are letting down our forces.

We cannot ignore the terrorist threat to this country. I was interested in the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, regarding a department of homeland security. We have the nuclear threat from North Korea, an uncertain Iran, a fragile Pakistan and significant increases in Russian and Chinese defence expenditure. Russia is considering using bases in Cuba, Venezuela and pushing into the Arctic. It was announced earlier this week that Russia and China are planning something like 25 joint manoeuvres. That announcement was made by Defence Ministers from what is termed the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation, which is seen as an emerging rival to NATO. The world is still a very dangerous place and we have to keep up our guard.

What should be the strands of our defence policy in the short to medium term? First—I believe the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, referred to this earlier—we must stay close to America, our number one military ally. I would suggest that we are all a lot more comfortable with President Obama’s approach of more talking, less sabre-rattling and less axis-of-evil language. Secondly—this came up at Question Time earlier—we welcome France’s return to the military structure in NATO. We must work to support greater European defence co-operation and support more joint procurement. We should try to encourage greater United Kingdom corporate activity in helping to consolidate the European defence industries. One looks at what BAE Systems has achieved in the United States. It employs significantly more people there than it does in this country. The lead towards consolidation can come from our industry.

Thirdly, we must work towards a reduction in nuclear weapons. The right reverend Prelate referred to that. There is increasingly a questioning of Trident. A number of noble Lords, including the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, and the noble Lords, Lord Judd and Lord Ramsbotham, referred to Trident. Is it truly independent? Realistically, are we ever likely to press the button? Can we afford the cost of anything up to £100 billion in today’s money values over a 40-year period from 2015? Can that sort of expenditure realistically be justified? Could other delivery systems such as the Astute submarines carry a more modest nuclear capability, if we judge that to be necessary? I am increasingly undecided on Trident, and increasingly Trident-sceptic. Perhaps the time has come to set up a serious Future of Trident commission, involving senior diplomats, defence experts, naval specialists and logistical and financial personnel to look seriously at all the options, however radical.

Fourthly, it is increasingly accepted that we need more mobile and a greater number of special forces. The Secretary of State referred to that in a speech earlier this week. A littler earlier today, my noble friend Lord Burnett spoke of the marines and commandos in action in Afghanistan. He also acknowledged the tremendous efforts of the Gurkhas and the debt we owe them. The noble Baroness, Lady Park, also referred to the Gurkhas. In Written Answers to my good friend Nick Harvey in the other place, the Armed Forces Minister, Bob Ainsworth, effectively conceded that 30 per cent of parachutists in our leading airborne fighting unit are not sufficiently qualified at present. A total of 11 parachuting courses were cancelled in the past 12 months owing to lack of aircraft. So can we justify two new large carriers plus aircraft and escorts in our increasingly constrained circumstances? The suggestion in the other place made by Nicholas Soames and others was that perhaps we ought to be thinking about a number of smaller carriers—perhaps the development of HMS “Ocean”-type vessels which can carry helicopters. My noble friend Lord Addington also questioned the role of heavy armour. Fifthly, there is the whole question of our reserves.

We have to sensibly and intelligently handle the transition from being perhaps a superpower to being a very capable second-division player, all the while keeping up our guard and recognising that we need more mobile and lighter Armed Forces. Finally, and crucially, we have to honour the covenant with our service personnel in terms of length of deployment, training, pay, equipment, accommodation and aftercare. We must show greater awareness of mental problems that arise for those who have been in combat. We owe our brave service personnel nothing less.

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord King for having arranged this important debate. I start by saying how delighted I am to see my noble friend Lady Park back in her place. I know that I speak for the whole House when I say how much she has been missed.

I also express my deeply felt appreciation to all the men and women in our Armed Forces. Daily they perform extraordinary tasks in service to our nation. As demonstrated by the death of Lance Sergeant Fasfous of the Welsh Guards, they are willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, pointed out the vital role that the families of service men and women play. My sympathy goes out to them and the loved ones of those—all too many of them—who have lost their lives, and particularly to those who are injured, some with life-changing injuries.

In an eloquent speech, my noble friend Lord Sterling mentioned the Royal Marine who had lost both legs only seven months after passing out. We are doing much to help, but the questions remain. Are we doing enough? What more could we, should we, be doing? My noble friend Lord King mentioned the mental price paid because of the difficult nature of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to research published in the British Medical Journal, the longer military personnel are deployed, the more likely they are to be at risk of developing psychological disorders and experiencing problems at home. In light of continued deployments, what are the Government doing to better advertise help available to veterans suffering from PTSD, both to GPs and the veterans themselves?

We also remember the 179 British service men and women who gave their lives in Iraq. This is a timely debate, given today’s very moving memorial service and the withdrawal of British troops from Basra. While the Army may be coming home, the Royal Navy is still active there and we must remember the strong presence they still have in the Gulf. As my noble and learned friend Lord Mayhew said, we also remember those service men and women killed in Northern Ireland.

We have had an excellent and authoritative debate with contributions ranging far and wide over the tasks which our Armed Forces are expected to perform. Putting all the views together it is clear that the situation is critical.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark both mentioned the Trident replacement. As was made clear in the defence procurement debate in the other place last week, we on these Benches welcome the decision to proceed with the Trident replacement. As the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, said, this is the ultimate peacekeeping weapon. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and my noble friends Lord Marlesford and Lord Attlee pointed out that there could be no satisfactory peacekeeping while there is such a wide disconnect between the MoD, DfID and the FCO. I went to Afghanistan a month after the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham—I thank the noble Baroness’s department for all its help in putting the visit together—and I share the admiration of the noble Lords, Lord Judd and Lord Burnett, for the Royal Marines I met out there, from Brigadier Gordon Messenger down. Many soldiers and Royal Marines I spoke to there wished that DfID could be less risk-averse and have a better understanding of the military outlook and culture.

The noble Lord, Lord Burnett, called for assurances on the two carriers and the JSF. He will be pleased to know that we on these Benches are publicly committed to both. My noble friend Lord Selsdon pointed out the important role the Royal Navy plays for this nation as a maritime nation. My noble friend Lord Sheikh pointed out that we owe members of the Armed Forces a duty of care. The military covenant has not been honoured fully during the two recent operations. My noble friend also mentioned the problems of the air bridge. The Minister is aware of my concerns on this issue and the number of service men and women who are being seriously inconvenienced and losing leave.

The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, and my noble friend Lord Attlee mentioned the vital role that the Special Forces carry out. I agree and I give them all my support. The noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, mentioned the Defence Medical Welfare Service and I pay tribute to the very important work that it does.

Many noble Lords mentioned the Gurkhas. Having served in Gurkha brigades in Malaysia and Hong Kong, I was delighted, like the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, at yesterday’s decision. I congratulate Joanna Lumley on the incredible campaign she has fought with these brave Gurkhas, coming to Parliament again and again.

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, for her very important work in chairing the Lords Defence Study Group and to my noble friend Lord Lyell for the work he does as secretary.

Afghanistan has, naturally, been mentioned by many noble Lords, as has Pakistan, particularly in a very interesting speech by my noble friend Lord Marlesford. On preparations for the August elections in Afghanistan and the planned increase in troop numbers, we have said that we would support an increase for the elections, as long as it was clearly justified and backed up by extra equipment, such as helicopters, and adequate force protection. Will the Minister confirm that this will be the case?

Yesterday, the Prime Minister talked about our NATO allies sharing a fairer burden in Afghanistan, as was announced at the recent NATO summit. Will the Minister tell the House when this commitment will be delivered and how many of the extra troops will be based in southern Afghanistan? Will the Minister give the House her assurance that personnel withdrawn from Iraq this year will be given sufficient rest, in line with the harmony guidelines, before they are deployed to Afghanistan? The Grenadier Guards’ last tour interval, for example, between tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was only eight months.

The Government’s neglect of the defence industry has been mentioned. The industry has become so concerned that the National Defence Industries Council plans to undertake a lobbying exercise to persuade the Government that this sector does matter. Not only does the defence sector provide some 305,000 jobs—10 per cent of Britain’s manufacturing workforce—it also contributes enormous revenues to the Exchequer. The United Kingdom is gaining a reputation as an unreliable partner. We hear that the Treasury will not sign off the order for the 16 tranche 3 Typhoons for the Royal Air Force at a cost of £1.44 billion. What implications will there be for the maintenance of key technology skills in this country if this deal does not go through? The Government cannot presume on the continued presence in the UK market of the international investors they want to see here if they are not given work. Maintaining design teams and preparing bids is not a cost-free exercise for industry; equipment does not get cheaper if programmes are delayed or reduced in numbers. Industry must recoup its costs.

Will the Minister say something about the assessment work on the FRES Scout reconnaissance vehicle? Not stalling on this, but replacing the antiquated CVR(T)s quickly, would send a positive message to our troops. With all the add-on equipment, they have now become totally unfightable.

Several noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, have called for a Strategic Defence Review. If my party comes to power next year, we are committed to carrying this out at an early stage.

It is right that we debate the big issues of defence and security policy, but it is fundamental that, in so doing, we should always keep in mind the demands that such policies make on the people who carry them out.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord King, not just on initiating this debate but also on choosing a topic on which so many Members of your Lordships’ House wished to contribute. I add my welcome to the noble Baroness, Lady Park. We did—perhaps surprisingly to some people—agree on one issue some time ago when we mounted a little campaign together. We will not, I am sure, agree on everything, but I welcome her back to the House, having admired her resolution and determination during my presence here.

As has been said, this is a very appropriate time to have a debate on defence. Mention has been made of events in Iraq, quite rightly, but there are also some anniversaries which we might perhaps take a moment to recall. Some of your Lordships may recall that it is 40 years to the day since HMS “Resolution” set ready on 30 April 1969, beginning the continuous at-sea deterrence. I know that we have had different views in the House today on the replacement, views which have been robustly countered by the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, and the noble Lord, Lord Astor. Interestingly, the Prime Minister also touched on this yesterday at Prime Minister’s Questions and talked about hopes for non-proliferation and hopes for progress, but also the need for us to be careful about our own defence.

Earlier this month, we had the celebration of NATO’s 60th birthday. Very few people who were present at NATO’s creation would have thought that this alliance would not only outlast the Cold War conditions that brought it into being, but successfully oversee the redrawing of the map of Europe and arrive at the new situation, the post-9/11 situation, and the dramatically different security environment that we now face. I have just returned from talks with people in Croatia and Albania, NATO’s newest members, and they, of course, come from an area that, only a decade ago, was actually at war.

Mention has also been made today, by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and others, of the decision by France to return to NATO’s integrated military structure, something that I hope we can all welcome. Mention has been made of the need to make progress in NATO on burden sharing. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, quite rightly drew attention to the challenges facing the new Secretary-General—no doubt with some sympathy on his part—with regard to the need further to develop the transformation and reform agenda within NATO.

On 6 June, it will be the 65th anniversary of British and allied servicemen coming ashore on the beaches of Normandy, and there will quite rightly be an international commemoration. These anniversaries are important in their own right, and because they underline some of the themes that have been raised in the debate: the variety of threats that we face; the crucial importance of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan; and—a unifying factor—the support that we must provide to those who are serving or who have served our nation with such distinction in so many ways.

Mention was made of the events this morning in Iraq, where the Defence Secretary attended what has rightly been described as a moving and important ceremony to mark the successful completion of the British combat mission and the transition to a close and, we hope, enduring bilateral relationship with Iraq. After a commitment lasting more than six years, British forces will now start to leave southern Iraq, with Basra transformed from how they found it six years ago. The commanding general of the coalition forces said:

“The accomplishment of the British forces across Iraq, and especially in Basra, has been nothing short of brilliant”.

Brigadier Tom Beckett, commander of 20 Armoured Brigade, said today:

“We leave knowing we have done our job and done it well”.

The importance of this should continue to be in our minds, which is why the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary have made a commitment to bring the Basra memorial wall home to a fitting resting place in Britain at the National Memorial Arboretum, which is an appropriate venue.

Noble Lords have talked about some of the challenges that we face, and we have had calls, not for the first time, for a defence review. Rightly, the Prime Minister has made it clear on more than one occasion that no one could have foreseen the sheer scale of the new global challenges that our growing interdependence brings; their scale, diversity and the speed with which they emerge. That is why the Government have launched the national security strategy, a new approach which is important for various reasons. It brings home the range of the threats and challenges and makes it clear that the distinction between defence and security is now more difficult to define than ever before. Security is not just about our forces in the conventional way that people think, but about the critical roles that they have to play all around the world.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and my noble friend Lord Judd also mentioned the importance of the role that we play in conflict prevention, helping other countries to tackle some of the serious security challenges that exist around the world which could have implications for us as a nation. That is why we in the UK have trained more than 12,000 African peacekeepers since 2004-05. We should acknowledge the contribution that they make, as well as that of those who are involved in other operations. It is important work.

I will now say a little about the work going on in operations. I have mentioned the events in Iraq today, which were important and impressive. It is right that we now move on to a new relationship. United Kingdom forces still have, as the noble Lord, Lord Astor, suggested, an important role to finish there. They are now focusing on completing the task of mentoring and training the 14th division. Importantly, the Royal Navy will continue to help to provide security for Iraq’s offshore energy infrastructure, as well as trying to help to train the Iraqi navy. The Royal Air Force provides essential support for Iraqi security forces as part of the coalition effort. We should commend what our troops have done in Iraq and recognise the continuing role that some will have to play.

Mention was made of the work on piracy around the Horn of Africa. The United Kingdom is at the forefront of the EU mission, with the operational headquarters at Northwood. The noble Lord, Lord Sterling, acknowledged the work that goes on there. It is important that we also acknowledge the United Kingdom’s lead on international co-ordination through the international contact group, which brings together civil, maritime, NATO and EU missions going on in that area. It is a United Nations-sanctioned approach, because it is important that everyone works together in that way.

When it comes to operations, our main thoughts at the moment are with Afghanistan. Mention has been made of the importance of the Afghanistan-Pakistan dimension, of which we in this country were always aware because, as was said earlier, we have to learn from our history. Yesterday’s Statement made it very clear that our main responsibility is to provide security for the area. We have to train the Afghan police and army. We have to establish the rule of law, and we have to help Afghans to tackle corruption and then to move on to economic development.

The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, mentioned other important issues, such as the rights of women. He had horrific statistics. That motivates us to help in many countries where there are problems of that kind. It is important to remember that we do not have a military operation there because of that. We have a military operation in Afghanistan to underpin our own security, because of all the threats that have emanated from there in the recent past. The noble Earl is right that we need a comprehensive approach to these issues, and we need to have joined-up government both here and on operations to maximise what we can do.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, suggested that our Armed Forces needed to know the answer to the old question, “Is our country behind us?”. I think that the country is behind our Armed Forces, but the noble and learned Lord is right to suggest that sometimes we have to remind the public of the dangers of not participating, not taking control and not re-establishing security in that area. The origins of 9/11, the Madrid bombing and the London Tube bombings can all be traced back to that area, and we have to make progress in our own interests.

Equipment, training and support are all extremely important. On numbers, this is never a static situation, because we always keep these under review. We intend to go up to 9,000 for the election period, of course with the kind of support and force protection that is required to do the job properly. As the Prime Minister pointed out yesterday, in the region of 5,000 other troops from European NATO countries are being considered for that kind of role. Some people are looking to provide extra police training through the gendarmeries that exist in some countries, which could be very important. It is now generally agreed that we have done well when it comes to delivering equipment to operations. The £10 billion that we have spent has produced very dramatic results, and our operational experience has been an important driver in terms of making sure that we are at the cutting edge of new equipment, and it has brought new ways of working.

On the Armed Forces security commitment, we have made progress with Kestrel and Osprey, but we do not stop there. Now we want to improve that to make lighter equipment of that kind to make movement easier, especially in that climate. The subject of vehicles, on which we have a good story to tell, has already been raised. More than £1 billion of new money has been approved for new vehicles for operations, including £350 million for more than 400 new light and medium vehicles: the Coyote and the Husky—the ones with the exciting names. We also have the experience of some of those which we have developed so far, such as the Mastiff, which has been a tremendous success. They are getting into the field very quickly; I was asked about that earlier. However, I remind the House that we are not simply buying these vehicles off the shelf. They often have to be developed to meet the challenging conditions we face in Afghanistan. We must commend industry and those in the MoD working in this area. They have turned the speed of development around, which is important.

We have also made significant progress in the air. We have managed to maintain extra flying hours: helicopter flying hours in Afghanistan are now 84 per cent higher than in November 2006. There are a whole variety of initiatives for upgrading helicopters and working with other countries on them. It is significant that real progress has been made. Of course, we could always use more helicopters on operations, but it is important to realise that those in charge in the field have sufficient resources for their requirements.

With five minutes to go, it is difficult to cover all the issues. Some other equipment matters were raised. Noble Lords have discussed the wisdom or otherwise of aircraft carriers. Our problem with equipment is that we will always want the best of everything. The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, talked about which fast jet we need. However, different vehicles have different attributes. We must ensure that we get the best value for money and work with partners where we can, and learn from the urgent operational requirements that sometimes getting something relatively simple and straightforward that we can build on later can be of great benefit even though that is not often how we do things.

I was asked specifically about the A400M. That contract is causing us considerable concern, as it is for our partner nations. We are worried about this and seeking to make progress. We cannot allow a gap in our capabilities and are therefore exploring a number of options including the procurement or lease of additional C17s or C130Js, or extending the life of some of our C130Ks. The issue is causing concern, but will not be solved by this country alone.

In the few minutes remaining, I will say a word about our Armed Forces and our work on the service command paper issues. I remind the House that this was a first: an unprecedented piece of cross-government work, bringing together all the issues affecting our service personnel. It is important to remember the two key principles upon which it was based. First, no disadvantage should flow from service in our Armed Forces. Secondly, in certain circumstances, it is right and proper for our Armed Forces to be treated in a special way, particularly when they have been injured in the course of duty.

We are investing in a whole range of issues and working with other government departments and devolved Administrations. On accommodation, for example, the Chancellor announced last week that £50 million will be brought forward to build new MoD houses to tackle the legacy of underinvestment in that area, which is important. The pay review board is out, and people will welcome that settlement. Health was mentioned today. The noble Baroness, Lady Emerton, said that the Defence Medical Welfare Service was not well known. She makes it very well known on many occasions in these debates. Others have spoken of the fantastic service at Headley Court. It is significant that the chair of the Healthcare Commission said recently that there is absolutely no question that personnel injured in battle have a better chance of survival than ever before, and that this is entirely due to the efficient and innovative care delivered under exceptionally difficult circumstances.

That is something that we should be and are doing—as, indeed, we are doing more on mental health. It is important to recognise that the community-based veterans’ pilot health schemes are important and could show us the way forward. As with mental health generally, this has been a neglected area in the past and a great deal of attention has been paid to it since.

Lastly, on recognition, the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, mentioned the reception in the House of Lords and the fantastic response of colleagues, although she said that they were sometimes surprised. We have all welcomed the tremendous public turnout at the homecoming parades and civic receptions. That is a tangible expression of the public support and appreciation of our Armed Forces. We all have a responsibility to ensure that there is no dislocation and that the public understand that our Armed Forces are working in order to help and protect them. We also all have a responsibility to the families of our armed servicemen.

I welcome a debate of this kind. It has been timely. In many ways, it has united this House in appreciation of and respect for the work of our Armed Forces.

My Lords, first, I express my gratitude to the Minister for the conscientious way in which she has responded to the debate. As she rightly said, it has attracted considerable interest and I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part. I have heard every speech except for just a couple; I will certainly read those, particularly as I have been told that they said nice things about me.

I am not surprised that a lot of people wanted to take part in the debate. That underlines our present deep concern. Many noble Lords have said that this was an appropriate time for this debate and have alluded to the events in Basra this morning, and the recent developments with the Prime Minister’s Statement on Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Statement on the reserves referred to by my noble friend Lord Attlee. Against this background, I noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, launched the theme of a need for a strategic defence review. That, in different forms with different words, was picked up widely around the House. There is now absolutely no question that we face a serious situation, undoubtedly made even more grave by the current financial position. However, as I said in my opening remarks, we went into this financial problem already in a difficult situation. The challenges are there.

This debate was about our Armed Forces. Everybody has paid tribute to their courage, fortitude and achievements. In those circumstances, and in recognition of that, we owe it to them to ensure that the policies, provisions and the circumstances in which they operate are the very best that we can provide for them to do their outstanding work. Against that background, with great appreciation for all those who have taken part, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

My Lords, with permission I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary. The Statement is as follows:

“Mr Speaker, with your permission I will make a Statement about the civilian crisis in Sri Lanka. I returned this morning from a visit there with the French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner. I regret that the Sri Lankan authorities declined to allow our Swedish counterpart, Carl Bildt, to join us. Our visit to Sri Lanka was prompted by our increasing concern for civilians in the north of the country, particularly the plight of the civilian Tamil population. There are in fact two crises: that of the civilians trapped in the conflict zone as the Government enter the final stage of their fight with the LTTE terrorists, and that of the tens of thousands of civilians who have crossed over the front line in recent days.

The purpose of the visit was twofold: first, to highlight the need to bring the conflict to an end in a way that minimises further civilian casualties; and, secondly, to press the need for a long-term political settlement that meets the aspirations of all communities in Sri Lanka. Foreign Minister Kouchner and I met President Rajapakse, Foreign Minister Bogollagama, the leader of the Opposition and Tamil and Muslim mainstream politicians. I am grateful for the way the Sri Lankan Government facilitated our visit. We were briefed by the heads of the main UN agencies and the ICRC. We also visited a government-run camp for internally displaced people at Vavuniya and visited a field hospital donated by the French Government. I heard a number of personal testimonies from recent arrivals in the camp.

The fog of war makes it difficult to be certain of the facts of the present situation. That is compounded by the lack of access for international agencies and the media. I heard widely different estimates of the number of civilians still trapped in the conflict zone. Government estimates ranged from 6,000 to 20,000; the UN, ICRC and most others reckon that there were at least 50,000, and some thought that the number could be as high as 100,000. Whatever the truth, it is clear that significant numbers remain, living under appalling conditions, undernourished and in fear for their lives. I heard reports of civilians hiding in trenches to escape the shelling and of horrific injuries. I also spoke to people in the IDP camps who recounted how the LTTE had forced them to stay in the so-called no-fire zone against their will, and shot at them when they tried to flee.

We were told that 30 tonnes of food were delivered to the conflict zone between 1 April and 27 April, apparently enough to feed 60,000 people for just one day. A further ship delivered limited supplies during our visit. The ICRC has only been able to send in very limited medical supplies, despite having plentiful stocks in Sri Lanka. The block on deliveries of food and medical supplies hinges on security. To deliver these essentials to those innocent civilians trapped in the conflict zone, there needs to be safety. Ships take time to unload and the pauses provided by the Sri Lankan Government have not been long enough. As the House knows, the Government of Sri Lanka declared an end to combat operations on 27 April; the President and Defence Secretary confirmed that to me personally and in definite terms. Those commitments must be upheld.

In our discussions with the President and the Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner and I made it clear that the protection of civilians must be paramount. We emphasised that if the LTTE had any heart at all, it would let the civilians leave the conflict zone. As G8 Foreign Ministers said in their statement of 25 April, we were very clear that the time for the conflict to end is now. We were briefed in detail by the Sri Lankan authorities on their humanitarian relief efforts outside the conflict zone. We welcomed that exchange of information, the extensive work that was under way and the commitments made. Nevertheless, some of what we were told contradicted the information given to us by the international humanitarian agencies.

According to the UN, 161,765 Tamils have left the conflict zone since October last year, including 119,000 in the last 10 days. This is very welcome, but the numbers have seriously challenged the Sri Lankan authorities. The UN agencies were frustrated that the Government appear to put unnecessary obstacles in the way of them and of others trying to assist the Government in dealing with this crisis. The agencies lack any access to IDPs until they have already been through a preliminary screening process, and do not have full access to the camps; visas and authorisations to move people and goods into and around the country are too limited. Meanwhile, people are not being allowed out of the camps and many families have been separated. Some men, alleged to be LTTE cadres, have been taken from families and placed in so-called rehabilitation camps. All of this reinforces the need for full and unhindered access by the UN and other agencies.

We therefore returned again and again in our talks to five specific needs in respect of the humanitarian situation: first, for visas to be issued to international humanitarian staff swiftly; secondly, for travel permits for staff working on approved projects inside Sri Lanka; thirdly, for full access to IDPs as soon as they have crossed the front line and monitoring of all stages of screening; fourthly, for a proper resettlement programme with specific deadlines to fulfil the Government’s commitment to 80 per cent of IDPs resettled by year’s end; and, fifthly, to allow the distribution of sufficient food and medicine to meet the needs of civilians trapped in the conflict zone. We were promised intensive follow-up by the Sri Lankan Government and we will continue to engage with them on those issues.

At present, the Sri Lankan Government are engaged in a war without witness in the north of the country. Civilians have fled the terror of the LTTE, but are afraid of what awaits them at the hands of the Government and unsure whether they will ever be allowed to return home. We were given assurances by the Sri Lankan Government that they had nothing to hide; we responded that it could therefore only be to their benefit to work with the international community in a fully transparent way. By giving UN agencies and international NGOs the freedom to operate to capacity in all areas, the Sri Lankan Government would bring much needed relief to many thousands of traumatised people, but also bring the confidence of the international community.

My right honourable friend for Kilmarnock and Loudoun will be taking up the invitation of President Rajapakse to visit Sri Lanka as part of a cross-party group of MPs next week, and will pursue those five points. The other members of the group will be the right honourable Member for Gordon and the honourable Members for South Down, for Buckingham and for Glasgow Central. I share the gratitude of my right honourable friend for Kilmarnock and Loudoun that they have agreed to take part in this important visit. I will be visiting New York on 11 May and will pursue further UN involvement in the crisis. I will be discussing with Hillary Clinton and other like-minded colleagues how we can work more closely together to find a way to bring the fighting to a stop.

I am grateful to all Members of the House who contributed to the debate yesterday. No one should underestimate the murderous damage done to Sri Lanka over the past 26 years by the LTTE, or the sheer hatred felt for its leadership. That is recognised in the international community. But while terrorist organisations work by killing people, democratic Governments exist to protect them. That is why the fighting in Sri Lanka must end now. The LTTE is apparently cornered and trapped, having inflicted grievous suffering on the people of Sri Lanka, primarily Sinhalese and Tamil but also Muslims. How the conflict is ended will have a direct bearing on the prospects for long-term peace in the country. The Government must win the peace as well as win the war. That will be the continuing focus of this Government's activity, hand in hand with international partners, in the days and weeks ahead”.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement made by the Foreign Secretary in another place. The Conservative Benches share his deep concern about the desperate humanitarian crisis in northern Sri Lanka and the suffering of innocent civilians who have been trapped by the fighting. We reiterate his calls for a lasting ceasefire. It was surely right for the Foreign Secretary to travel to Sri Lanka with the French Foreign Minister. In the words of the Red Cross—here I declare an interest as being a vice-president and a former working member for more than 30 years—the situation in the north of the country is “nothing short of catastrophic”. Civilians trapped in the tiny enclave are desperately short of food, water and medical care and remain in the firing line. The United Nations estimates that as many as 6,500 civilians may have been killed and another 14,000 wounded in the Government’s offensive this year.

I would like to raise three sets of questions relating to the Minister’s three points on the humanitarian crisis, the efforts to secure a ceasefire and the long-term prospects for a political solution in Sri Lanka. We welcome the additional UK humanitarian aid for Sri Lanka that the Minister has outlined. According to the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, at least 50,000 people are still trapped in the conflict zone, which has shrunk to less than 10 square kilometres. Is he fully satisfied that the Sri Lankan Government have heeded international calls to show the maximum possible restraint in their operations in the area?

There seems to be some confusion regarding the use of heavy weapons by the government forces. Can the noble Lord assure the House that the Sri Lankan Government have heeded international calls to stop all use of heavy weapons in the fighting zone, and that it has been possible to verify this? For the record, is he confident, too, that no UK-supplied defence equipment or technology has been used in attacks on civilians during the conflict, and have efforts been made to ascertain this? Have the Sri Lankan Government agreed to permit aid convoys to reach the fighting zone by road, which we understand has not been possible since 20 January?

We strongly support the UN Secretary-General’s decision to dispatch a humanitarian team to the conflict zone, and support his call for the mission to be allowed into the area as soon as possible. Has that been possible? Aid workers have told UNHCR that some of the people in the camps have not eaten for days, and cite growing problems of hunger, lack of transport to move the sick to hospitals and a shortage of medical personnel. Has the Foreign Secretary raised these issues with the government officials whom he met in Sri Lanka? Can the noble Lord update the House as regards the 13 UN staff members who have been prevented from leaving IDP camps despite repeated promises from the Government that they will be released?

My second set of questions concerns the efforts to secure a ceasefire. Does the noble Lord see a need for formal UN Security Council involvement—for example, a UN resolution—to persuade both sides to lay down arms? Earlier today, the Foreign Secretary said to my right honourable friend the shadow Foreign Secretary that he would speak to the US Secretary of State, Mrs Hillary Clinton, today. I wonder whether he has spoken to her yet and what the outcome of those discussions was. What discussions have the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister’s envoy had with the Commonwealth about using that organisation’s weight and influence to encourage Sri Lanka to end its operations and bring about a long-term ceasefire, called for by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and Human Rights Watch?

Thirdly and finally, does the Minister agree that there can be no military solution to this conflict, and that the only way forward is a negotiated settlement that satisfies the concerns and legitimate aspirations of all Sri Lankans and preserves democracy in the country? What assurances has he received from the Sri Lankan Government about their commitment to such a political process? Has he received any indication from the Sri Lankan Government that they will be prepared to accept the UK’s nominated special envoy? Are the Government confident that the envoy is able to make a meaningful contribution to resolving the conflict without acceptance by the Sri Lankan Government?

The distinction between foreign and domestic policy has nowadays become blurred. A growing number of our citizens live simultaneously in many homelands. What happens in Sri Lanka yesterday may well have an impact on Britain today. This means that we have to take into account that our own domestic policy has to be foreign policy as well. Again, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. In the same spirit, I hope he will continue to keep the House informed through Oral and Written Statements.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for repeating the Statement. The Foreign Secretary’s visit to Sri Lanka is very welcome, although I am sorry that the Swedish Foreign Minister was not given a visa. I am glad that it is to be followed up by the cross-party delegation of MPs, including my right honourable friend Malcolm Bruce, chair of the International Development Select Committee.

Does the noble Lord agree that it is extraordinary how little the international community has been able thus far to protect the civilians trapped between rebel and government forces? Surely this is a case where the UN has a duty to protect. How, in practice, can this be carried through in such circumstances? What role can international humanitarian law play here? Both sides are accusing each other of atrocities. What independent investigation of possible atrocities might be undertaken and would the UK Government support it? Does the Minister agree that both sides should be warned that they are personally accountable in this area? What will be done to ensure that things do not now spiral into revenge killings?

It is appalling that the UN humanitarian organisations and the media have been so restricted. As the noble Lord pointed out, it is surely in the interests of the Sri Lankan Government to allow them through, given the claims that they themselves have made. This is yet another conflict where accounts from one side simply do not tally with the other and we must rely on the neutrality of the UN and ICRC. Given what the Sri Lankan Government have said about a ceasefire, what plans are there for getting civilians out and aid in? The Tamil Tigers should immediately allow civilians to leave and cease forced recruitment. Civilians and fighters who agree to lay down their arms need strong international guarantees of their safety. Only international supervision, unhindered by the Government, can provide the necessary level of protection.

Some have expressed a fear of genocide. Is Britain meeting all its obligations under the 1948 Convention on Genocide, given that these accusations have been made? The UN and the ICRC must become responsible for supervising all stages of the screening process when people enter and leave any IDP camps. This must be fully documented. We hear some very worrying stories. What will be done to ensure that people can then return home and that areas will not, for example, be designated as militarily sensitive zones, to which people cannot return?

As we look at points of pressure, what is happening to put pressure on the LTTE to let civilians go? What further pressure can be put on the Sri Lankan Government, who, as the noble Lord said, are not a terrorist group but a Government with particular responsibilities? What is the Government’s position on Sri Lanka’s request for a significant IMF loan? Surely Sri Lanka must first listen to the reasonable humanitarian requests of the international community.

What discussions has the Minister had with other Governments to produce a package of other financial sanctions, such as the end to all non-emergency development aid, which might be imposed on the Government of Sri Lanka if they fail to listen, as has been suggested by the International Crisis Group and others? Beyond that, does he agree, as the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, said, that no lasting peace will be possible if the concerns of both communities are not addressed? What plans are there for full international engagement to ensure that a just peace follows the bloodshed of this period? Without that, Sri Lanka will continue to be extremely unstable, which is in no one’s interests, from whichever community they come.

My Lords, I thank both noble Baronesses for their statements. I shall try to respond to the many questions they have posed with the caveat used by the Foreign Secretary of the “fog of war”. Frankly, much of the detail of this conflict, such as the number of casualties or whether war crimes have been committed, is very hard to establish at the moment. The international agencies, not having the degree of access that they might normally have in such a situation, are forced to make guesstimates and to acknowledge that on certain issues they do not have enough information on which to offer a judgment.

On the number of civilians still trapped in the conflict zone, although the Government believe that the number may be as low as some thousands, and perhaps up to 6,000, the United Nations believes that the figure is more than 50,000 and has said so publicly. There is no agreement even on the size of the remaining civilian problem. Certainly the Foreign Secretary and his French counterpart urged the maximum restraint on the Government of Sri Lanka and they have just announced that there would be an end to the use of heavy weapons. That issue came up in the two Foreign Secretaries’ meeting with the Sri Lankan defence minister, where it was observed that suspending the use of these weapons came as a surprise because people thought that they had already stopped using them. There is continued uncertainty about exactly the type of fighting that is going on. The Government insist that it is now in a last-phase operation and others allege that there is still very heavy fighting.

On the access of aid convoys by road and by sea, the two Foreign Secretaries insisted to the Government that there was now plenty of aid, both food and medical supplies, in the country and that the key issue is access—the ability to deliver the aid. Not nearly enough food, medical supplies or indeed aid workers have been able to enter the area.

I turn to whether British military assistance has been used in the conflict. As this conflict is not a new one, we have issued export licences for military equipment in a very limited and, I hope, judicious way. Although we have not investigated the matter, I very much hope that no such materiel has been used.

On the 13 UN workers, I believe that they still have not been released from the camps. I cannot tell the noble Baroness whether the Secretary of State and Foreign Secretary have yet spoken. As the Statement in the Commons was not that long ago, I am afraid the noble Baroness has caught me on that one.

On the Commonwealth discussions, I have been leading those and have been in regular touch with the Commonwealth secretary-general who, at this moment, is trying to organise the next CMAG. At the previous one, Sri Lanka was raised under other business. He is determined that it should be raised. Sri Lanka itself is currently a member of CMAG, which is about the breakdown of democracy in terms of the Harare principles that it seeks to enforce. The case needs to be made about the grounds and terms on which this discussion can take place, but the Commonwealth secretary-general has been clear in condemning the conflict, appealing for a ceasefire, and stating that this matter is the business and concern of the Commonwealth and that the Commonwealth has a role to play.

On the issue of there being no military solutions, we confirm that there needs to be a political process of reconciliation. We also need to be clear that this conflict has reached a point where one side has won in all but final name. Therefore, the conclusion of the fighting needs to be organised around that fact of life on the battlefield. We need to get an orderly end to the conflict followed by a process of political reconciliation and a meeting of the legitimate need for a say in their own government for the Tamil people. Otherwise, one can only fear that this conflict will resume in different, equally viral and pernicious forms in both Sri Lanka and abroad at a later date. We have been very clear that, while these two processes may be separate, there must be an end to the fighting and then a process of political reconciliation to address the roots of the conflict. The UK special envoy will be visiting next week as part of a parliamentary delegation. He has already been very active both internationally and with the Tamil community here in the UK, so we hope he is going to play an important part in the next steps of this process.

I agree with the noble Baroness that there is a clear UN duty to protect. It seems, in many ways, to meet the conditions of the responsibility to protect whereas the Government, because of the conflict, may not have properly met the need to protect their own civilian population. As always with a doctrine of international humanitarian law, the real issue is enforcement or implementation of that concept. The UN Secretary-General has been enormously active, as has his Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, in terms of seeking to secure entry to the conflict zones for a UN team to assess what is going on and, subsequently, to contribute to providing humanitarian assistance in that zone, arriving at a ceasefire, and improving the conditions and protection arrangements for civilians in the transit camps. The commitment that the UN Secretary-General thought he had for such a deployment has been challenged and delayed, so the UN is frustrated at not having more access at this time. It is seized with this and there have been urgent discussions in both New York and Colombo.

As to the role of the IMF loan, the preparations for that are continuing. It is due to be considered by the IMF board in the middle of the month and at that time it will be important to arrive at a view on it. Obviously, we have been trying to ensure that the IMF financing of countries caught up in the global economic crisis is done in as urgent and felicitous a way as possible, but we cannot look at this in isolation from the broader conflict currently under way in the country.

My Lords, is the Minister aware that it is very welcome to see our Foreign Secretary go to Sri Lanka? If nothing else, it must have been a reality check for him. Does the Minister agree, however, that whatever way we look at it, the Tamil Tigers are a terrorist organisation? They do not represent the Tamil community. Is it not incredible that close to one quarter of a million people have been used as a human shield for the past four months, as they have been driven from the northern end of central Sri Lanka right to the far north-east of that country? Furthermore, the Tamil Tigers could have released all those people at any point but still today they refuse to let them go. Is it not a fact that the only people who have managed to escape have done so because the smashing of the bund by the government forces ensured that refugees could come through? It is a war, not a conflict. It is a war that has gone on for 25 years and must be brought to an end when the Tamil Tigers either surrender or are eliminated.

Turning to humanitarian matters, is it not time that the international community recognised that there are a quarter of a million refugees there in temporary camps who must be resettled? Should we in this country not now take a lead? Why could we not take a lead in restoring Kilinochchi, the provincial centre for Sri Lanka, and encourage others to join us so that we can resettle those poor people—not just Tamil, not just Sinhalese, not just Muslims? There are nearly 250,000 in the current camps and 100,000 left over from the earlier stages of the war. If this country believes in its special relationship with Sri Lanka, can we not give a real lead? Although the £2.5 million promised by the Prime Minister on Sunday is welcome, it is only a drop in the ocean. Should we not be talking about substantial sums to achieve the resettlement of those poor people?

My Lords, as the Foreign Secretary made clear in the Statement, the LTTE is a terrorist organisation that has held up to 200,000 civilians as human shields. He said that plenty of evidence was confirmed to him directly in his interviews in the transit camp that he visited that people who had tried to escape had been shot at and, in many cases, killed. There is no condoning, excusing, apologising for or defending the behaviour of the LTTE. Given that, fortunately and to the great relief of everyone, the democratic Government of Sri Lanka have the upper hand and are on the verge of finishing this conflict, it is perfectly proper for us as allies of that Government to expect from them the standards of a democratic Government: that they allow access and ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches the victims of the conflict; and that, in their military operations, they act prudently to protect civilians—on the simple principle, if no other, that two wrongs do not make a right.

On the noble Lord’s suggestion that we commit more resources for the resettlement of Tamils and others, I have no doubt that the time for that will come and that the UK will be a generous donor, but let me again say that at the moment the issue is not resources, which are available for this phase, but access for that humanitarian assistance which is in-country but cannot reach the victims. Most critical in future will be the willingness of the Government to live up to their pledge to resettle 80 per cent of those in camps by the end of this year. Then there will be something that we can support in long-term rehabilitation. At the moment, the people remain in camps.

My Lords, there is a significant Tamil diaspora in this country. They are very concerned about what is happening to their friends and relatives, and we are very concerned about the humanitarian issue. As we all know, the Tamils are protesting outside in Parliament Square, and they have also been outside the Indian High Commission. Has the Minister met the Tamil leaders to assure them that have done everything possible to resolve the situation; and is there something special that they would like us to do? We learnt a lot by resolving the conflict in Northern Ireland, and I am sure that we would have something significant to offer to reach long-term peace.

My Lords, let me tell the noble Lord one very good piece of news. The last remaining young hunger striker today suspended his hunger strike and has been taken to hospital. More broadly, there has been a welcome by those outside to the visit of the Foreign Secretary and to the efforts of my right honourable friends the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary to address this issue and this crisis with the vigour that we have. We have sought to do what we think is proper in terms of the humanitarian case that we have made in Sri Lanka and what is proper in terms of British national interests. We have sought to communicate intensively with the British Tamils outside here in terms of those objectives. Equally, we have tried to take pains not to allow British policy to somehow be held hostage to these demonstrations. The critical thing has been to do what is right.

My Lords, I am very grateful for the report and for the work that is being done in Sri Lanka. In the context of our particular link in Ripon with the churches in Sri Lanka and, particularly, with the Bishop Duleep de Chickera of Colombo, will the Government affirm, recognise and support the role of the churches as a tiny minority in Sri Lanka, working with international friends and allies in seeking to achieve peace, justice and humanitarian aid for all communities there? Will he comment on our view that the vast majority of Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka want peace, work for it and that that is a source of substantial hope for the future?

My Lords, I had the privilege of meeting the Bishop of Colombo when he was here for the Lambeth Conference. I saw him as a remarkable spokesman, not just for the issues of the Tamils in this conflict, but for broader issues of freedom of speech, freedom of the media and freedom of religion in the country.

In a country that enjoys a democratically elected government, and a multi-ethnic society where strains have inevitably been introduced by such a violent and brutal 25-year civil war, he, and the churches more generally, have been important spokespeople for tolerance and mutual understanding and for the communities living in peace with each other. I affirm what the right reverend Prelate says; the great majority of Sri Lankans do live in peace with each other, are proud of the tolerance that they show towards each other and are as concerned as any outsider about the loss of tolerance that has resulted from a brutal civil war that has sharpened and hardened what has been a very compassionate, tolerant and inter-ethnic understanding.

To call attention to the Government’s public health agenda; and to move for papers.

My Lords, I would like to make it clear at the outset that those of us who criticise the NHS are not for one moment ignorant of, or unappreciative of, the great amount of good, even brilliant, treatment that so many patients receive. It must not be assumed that because we draw attention to the undeniable fact that some patients are very badly treated and beg for deficiencies to be remedied we are condemning the whole NHS. We certainly are not. But there are thousands of cases where clear proof of bad, even inhumane, treatment has resulted in suffering and death. We have a duty to bring those cases to public attention and to try to put things right, which is appallingly difficult.

Since 2002, I have been trying to ensure that hospital patients are routinely given food and water. In 2003, my Patients’ Protection Bill put forward some solutions; for instance, asking relatives and friends if they could come in and feed or give a drink to helpless patients, which is quite common practice in many European countries. That and other suggestions fell by the wayside. The Bill was allowed no further than Second Reading. Six long years later it is reported that patients in Stafford Hospital are so desperate to have a drink that they pull the flowers out of the vases and drink what is left. It is also reported that many have become severely dehydrated. I cannot bear to think of the suffering that they must have endured, nor that if warnings had been heeded and acted on, that suffering need never have happened.

The past six years have made no difference for the patients who do not get fed either. Only last month, figures came out showing that almost 30,000 hospital meals are thrown away uneaten and untouched every day. Is that because they are inedible or because some are not fed to patients? Or is it because the plate was put too far away for the patient to reach and whipped away with no help offered in either reaching or feeding, which is extremely common? Some hospitals throw away more than one-third of prepared meals. Some are even worse: the Middlesbrough primary care trust threw away 43 per cent of all prepared meals. What a wicked waste.

When asked about this, a health Minister in the other place blithely commented that no one should be concerned and that the situation merely reflects the need to give patients a choice. But I understand that those meals had already been ordered by the patients. They had made their choice. That excuse will not wash: figures released show that more than 8,000 people left hospital last year clinically malnourished. More than 240 people die in hospitals and care homes in England from malnutrition every year, which is truly shocking.

It is very wrong that there are still instances of MRSA, C. difficile and other killer bugs in our hospitals. Great efforts have been made to make the wards clean. Billions of extra pounds have been spent, but 24 trusts still fail basic hygiene tests. Wards are too crowded, with beds often packed tightly together. Nurses go out and about in the towns nearby, still wearing their uniforms. They pick up germs everywhere and go straight back to deal with patients in the same uniforms—which matron would never have allowed. Some hospitals allow too many visitors.

I am extremely concerned to have heard from several sources that the true numbers of deaths from these bugs are deliberately hidden and that death certificates often state the cause of death to be something other than MRSA et cetera. Trusts do not want the true cause known. No questions are asked if a person dies of pneumonia or a heart attack, but they do not want to let it get out that people are still dying of MRSA. Surely falsifying a death certificate is illegal.

Replacing matrons with managers was a mistake. I am sure that many hospital managers could run businesses brilliantly. But a hospital is not a business. One needs to have some medical knowledge in the task. Managers are not matrons. The former cannot be expected to run a hospital as efficiently as the latter.

I have raised other cases of bad treatment. For example, some patients are left in a cold ward with windows wide open and no warm coverings. Their deaf aids are taken or lost, which can make them seem confused and subnormal, and stricter discipline can be enforced. Ignoring repeated cries for help in getting to the bathroom is also common. A dossier of 25 cases, all of which I checked personally, was submitted to Ministers in this House. Those Ministers were helpful. They listened and the details were passed to the trusts concerned—where they met a blank wall. The allegations were either ignored or denied. Some of them were not investigated at all. The only thing that came out of the exercise was the introduction of a mysterious thing called a red tray. No one explained what it was, how it was proposed to use it, or what instructions to staff went with it. The noble Baroness, Lady Wall, kindly told me of her own personal experience, but none of the officials explained. So we never got far with the dossier.

The big question is whether this new body, the Care Quality Commission, will do better. Well, it is not exactly a new body, more a grouping together of three old bodies. The trouble is that, none of them, individually, has managed to right the wrongs that exist. In the introductory papers about the new body there is no admission whatever that there ever were any wrongs. The document says that the CQC will build on the good work of the existing commissions. That is the same old refusal to admit there is anything at all amiss—no hint of acceptance that improvements are needed. Sack the whistleblower: ignore the evidence.

Another quote from the document that the CQC put out says,

“our job is to make sure that providers continue to meet … quality standards”.

What does it mean “continue”? What quality are we talking about? It has not even started.

The setting up of the CQC will hardly improve matters, since the lady named as chief executive is the very same person who was responsible for checking the standards of care at Stafford Hospital, to which I have already referred. That has a dreadful record. It is reported that hundreds died there needlessly because standards of healthcare were so bad. It is reported that the number was somewhere between 400 and 1,200. That does not sound as if her checking was up to much. Whatever excuses may be made, whatever denials or apologies, the Government cannot expect that this chief executive, with this record at Stafford Hospital, comes into her new job with any confident backing.

That excellent organisation, Help the Aged, is currently campaigning for sick and elderly people in hospitals to be treated with dignity. It has my strong support, especially its demand for an end to mixed wards. There is no dignity, and small protection, for those finding themselves in the next bed to a stranger of the opposite sex at night, when there are not many staff about, and the ward is dark and undersupervised. Ministers seem to have given up on the problem. They say the sexes cannot be separated. Why not? They always were. Unless we are talking about intensive care and patients who are unconscious, mixed wards are an abomination.

There is no dignity in being left to lie for hours in a soiled bed. On 31 March, the BBC reported the case of a pensioner who snatched her elderly husband from a Stevenage hospital. She was so upset at his bad treatment, including being left in a wet bed, that she resolved to take him away—and she did. There was a row with the staff, who threatened her with the police. That should never have happened, but it has happened since. The staff have no right to threaten such people with police action and give them a police record. That is appalling. Since then, that lady’s husband has been fine, much more comfortable and happy. I understand that following the programme, the BBC was deluged with listeners who knew from experience exactly why the wife was determined to take him. His was not an isolated case. I could mention other wrongs, but time is short and others wish to speak.

How sad that, while medicine and pharmacology have made such enormous strides, the standards of care and respect for patients as human beings has declined almost past belief. Our brilliant surgeons can do heart, liver and kidney transplants—soon they will be doing whole face transplants, apparently—and our marvellous scientists can produce drugs that can combat almost every known disease. We have thousands of excellent nurses, but we can no longer ensure that people who go into hospital will receive the most basic care or keep their dignity. Does the Government’s public health agenda include any resolve to tackle these problems?

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, on her determination to follow through on a subject that she so clearly cares passionately about. I have chosen to concentrate on a different aspect of the public health agenda, which is that of trying to get people to help themselves through encouraging them to exercise. I often feel that I have to talk by myself on this subject and that people do not relate to me, but now I have the happy experience of being able to refer to an NHS document. I shall give the full title: A Systematic Review of the Evidence Base for Developing a Physical Activity and Health Legacy from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. What the document shows as you go through it is that there is a huge public health benefit to be derived from getting people to take exercise. That is not a revelation, but the fact is that we should exercise because it is one of the most effective forms of, let us say, self-maintenance.

The problem is that the Olympic Games have gone from being a dream to a cure-all in many fields. The document goes into how things should be implemented and lists local authorities, primary care trusts, schools, colleges and stakeholders. Later it mentions local government, LOCOG, national stakeholders and so on. Noble Lords will get the idea. I have spoken about the benefits of exercise before, which has produced interesting exchanges. I have often asked the noble Lord, Lord Davies, which department is responsible for increasing the take-up of exercise. He has responded by saying that it is the NHS or the Treasury. When I ask who will do it, one or other of those two departments will be quoted, but how do they work together and where is the guidance?

I suggest that in encouraging people to take exercise and play more sport, we should note the difference between what is exercise and what is sport. It is rather odd. Sport is something that you decide is a sport. Going for a run can be thought of as a sport, but people may regard it as a way of trying to keep their waistline down because the doctor told them to or they want to fit into last year’s clothes. Is running a sport or is sport something that needs a different type of support structure?

Having indulged myself for a few minutes, I come to the essence of what I am trying to get at today. How are the Government going to support both the Olympic movement and other bodies that work with sports at the participation level, where we are not talking about elite athletes? How is the Department of Health encouraging people to get involved? For instance, is the department going to develop a policy of naming and shaming local authorities that do not provide sufficient parks in which to take a pleasant walk? That is basic exercise rather than playing a sport. A good walking strategy for each town centre should be provided because it certainly would cover an exercise agenda. Will we make sure that local authorities have to comply or, if they do not have to, will we shame them if they do not? Are we going to ensure that there is sufficient open space to walk dogs, for example? The great excuse for taking exercise in our society is walking dogs. In rural areas, will we ensure that all footpaths are open? Will this be monitored? Will this be driven forward? If the Department of Health is not doing it, who will do it? The big beasts of the departments are involved here. Sport lives in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, but I would have it transferred to the Department of Health. There is disagreement in my party about this, but I like to nail my colours to the mast.

The question here is how we will achieve this aim. The document about the Olympics gives examples of how it might be achieved. However, the fact that we have a huge event that people watch on television will not guarantee greater participation, although it may encourage it in a few areas. It became blindingly obvious to me when it was pointed out that it may encourage people to take sport more seriously and push on to the next level but it will not necessarily encourage people to take up sport. This may be because it is discouraging to see the world’s best when you are wandering around without the basic skills.

How will the Government tap in and allow greater participation? Will the Department of Health make sure that there is better funding for basic-level coaching? This could be about movement and the ability to participate in sport occasionally. If you occasionally play five-a-side football and keep yourself fit enough to do so, exercise and sport will combine.

Do the Government have a definitive method for counting the increase in exercise? The same applies to interest in sport. If there was such a measure, at least we could tell whether we were succeeding or not. There is no guarantee. If the Government turn round and say, “Our gains are more successful than anyone’s in the past for increasing participation”, we will have a good excuse for bringing to account the relevant Minister, because this is the first Olympics where the Government have said that this is one of their goals. We must have realistic, minimum targets.

I now turn to a matter for which the Department of Health must bear sole responsibility: the provision of sport and exercise medicine. I asked about this a couple of weeks ago—the exact date escapes me—and the Minister pointed out that in 2005 the Government gave a commitment to provide enough consultants in sport and exercise medicine. The figures that I have are that there are eight trained individuals, whereas it is reckoned that we need 72 as a basic requirement. In the medical system, consultants are required to pass on information and to make sure that people have the necessary support.

There is a movement to replace certain kinds of drug therapy with exercise therapy. That relates to the obesity strategy and so on, but I will not go into that. The noble Baroness can take as read my criticism of the body mass index as a guide to obesity. The index fails to take into account that someone may be heavier built and that muscle per volume is much heavier than fat. My favourite statistic relates to Pinsent and Redgrave. When they won their last medal, they were simply heavily overweight as opposed to obese. The body mass index is a blunt instrument, which does not apply to anybody who is taking exercise that allows an increase in muscle mass. People can get heavier and fitter. This kind of exercise does not apply to this chart.

Why is it important that we have this extra guidance? One of the younger Members of this House—he is not in his place—who along with me is regularly required to compete with another place at various silly events, damaged his knee. It was a muscle tear—nothing serious. The doctor told him not to exercise for six weeks. If you leave a muscle not working for six weeks, it gets weaker, the tendons and ligaments around it are left in worse shape and, when you go back to using it, it is more likely to be damaged. That is a basic level of ignorance that is shocking in a doctor. How can we get people at the top who will ensure that when this occurs, if the doctor does not know what to do, he will consult on up—or indeed sideways, for physiotherapists?

We need people in place. If we take into account that these doctors are necessary for the implementation of the strategy, what are we doing to make sure that they are there? We have provided the training posts—usually by shifting funds around, or so I am told—but we are not providing the consultancy posts. People have dropped out of the training because there is no end place for them. If you are a registrar and you want to train, you might think, “I’ll further my career—oh, there’s nowhere to go, so I’ll stop doing the training”. That is perfectly natural in that situation; I am sure that if any of us was in a similar one, we would do the same. What are we doing about this?

I see that my 10 minutes are up. I suggest to the Minister that we need answers on this. Without them, much of what the Government are doing here becomes simply meaningless.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, for giving us the opportunity with this debate to raise issues of public health that are sometimes rather difficult to get into that context. I shall concentrate entirely on the issue of prison healthcare because although it is not currently in the public health agenda, I submit that it should be. Prison health is a public health issue.

When I took over as Chief Inspector of Prisons in 1995, I was surprised to find that, in the whole of the United Kingdom, only prisons were not part of the NHS. Prisoners were in the NHS before they went into prison and when they left prison they went back into the NHS, but while they were in prison they disappeared from the NHS radar. Prison Service healthcare used to claim equivalence with the NHS for maintaining this, but how could that be when only 10 per cent of prison medical directors were qualified to act as GPs in the NHS?

There was no properly structured nursing force, particularly for psychiatric nursing, not least because there were no career opportunities for people to develop careers inside such a small organisation as prison healthcare. There were therefore far too many short-term agency nurses, employed at great expense, which did not contribute to consistency or continuity of improvement, if such a thing was possible. What is more, prison doctors did not have access to notes on people before they came into prison, nor did doctors, after someone had been released, have access to notes made in prison almost without going to the trouble of getting an affidavit.

There were particular problems with the lack of professional oversight from all the NHS arrangements for such oversight that exist in hospitals and elsewhere. The only oversight was from my own inspectors, among whom I had a doctor and a nurse, but then we inspected only every five years. That was not good enough for overseeing the whole system.

Why is this a public health issue? Because every single prisoner, with the exception of about 30, is going to come out. The physical and mental health of that person is therefore a matter of interest for the public among whom they are going to be released. They may have physical ailments that, unfortunately, flourish in the prison environment, such as varieties of TB and all the blood-transmitted viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C. People age in prison; indeed, they age much more quickly in prison than they do outside. Children in prison can stay with their mothers until they reach the age of 18 months.

Then, there are the dreadful mental health statistics, with at least 70 per cent of prisoners suffering an identifiable personality disorder and about 500 requiring transfer into secure mental health accommodation because their condition is such that prison is wholly inappropriate as a place to hold them. Thankfully, since 2004, prisons are part of the NHS and healthcare provision is offered by primary, secondary and mental healthcare trusts. This is not the place to comment on the patchy nature of that provision, particularly in mental health, but it is important to have an overall direction and strategy for how healthcare is delivered. There is a great danger that unless you have consistent oversight of what is done, particularly for those with mental health problems, they will come out of prison worse than they went in. That is avoidable and inexcusable.

I say as an aside that I have always thought that one reason why prisons should be regionalised—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, recommended in his report following the Strangeways riots in 1990 and as picked up by the only White Paper on prisons, Custody, Care and Justice, published in 1991—is to avoid prisoners having to leave their own region. That would give regional NHS authorities an opportunity to have some control over what is done with and for their own people, whose treatment will be their responsibility on release. Prisoners should have a proper physical and mental health assessment when they enter prison and plans should be made to treat anything discovered while they are there, taking the opportunity of the sentence to make real progress. For people with mental health problems, that can include the development of a sustainable lifestyle with the clear understanding that what is established should be carried on elsewhere. This is where I believe that public health clicks in. It would be irresponsible to do less than I have outlined. It would be irresponsible to the public to whom the prisoner is returning.

Today the Bradley review on diversion was published. It concentrates largely on people in prison who have mental health problems. It contains 82 recommendations, and the Government have announced that they accept all of them in principle. However, there is obviously work to be done. I was fortunate enough to speak to the noble Lord this morning but I have not yet read the report. I asked him particularly whether his report contains signposts suggesting that public health authorities need to get on to what he is proposing and make it their responsibility for carrying it out. He said that it does. One of the things that he has recommended is a national programming board with an advisory board to serve it. That national advisory board will not achieve anything unless there is a part of the NHS which is responsible and accountable for seeing that those recommendations are delivered.

Prison healthcare is comparatively new to the NHS, and many different trusts are involved in contract work in different prisons, but what matters is that one part of the NHS should be responsible for overseeing the consistency of that treatment, wherever it is given. Oversight of the provision from these various trusts also is needed to ensure that every prisoner has the assessment needed to ensure that this opportunity is not missed. It makes absolute sense for public health authorities to be given that responsibility. I urge the Minister to pursue this matter with her department after this debate.

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, for her perceptive intuition in inspiring this debate at this crucial moment when the press is dominated by the possibility of a flu pandemic which would challenge considerably our public health agenda. I want in that context to draw attention to the Department for Communities and Local Government paper issued this week on Faith Communities and Pandemic Flu. I thank Monsignor John Devine and the Faith Communities Consultative Council for their input, and I stress the crucial importance of faith communities in any pandemic.

I am very grateful for the measured government response to the current flu threat, both in calling for vigilance and in combating irrational panic. It is crucial that, should there be a pandemic, anyone infected stays at home. It is equally crucial that those not infected continue both to work and to support those who are ill. Basic respiratory and hand-hygiene standards, such as the use of tissues and careful hand washing, are key to our care for one another. That fits in closely with the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, about hygiene in hospital. It applies also to hygiene within our communities and would do so very particularly were there to be a pandemic.

I also welcome and affirm the ethical framework of the DCLoG document: that in a pandemic all people matter equally. In that context, the prayer and worship of faith communities matters crucially. That would provide support for those who are ill and strength for those not infected to provide help for others. I particularly commend, from that document and elsewhere, the development of flu-friend networks which can be based in churches, mosques or other faith communities or elsewhere whereby there is organised provision to collect antivirals for vulnerable people. That is something that can be set up locally—it must be set up locally; it cannot be set up in any other way—and would provide a structure whereby help can be provided in the event of a pandemic.

Imaginative ways of contacting people with prayer and support need to be developed locally, including internet prayers and phone numbers advertised alongside those provided through the NHS. It is also important that faith communities consider how to adapt their own ceremonies should a pandemic arise, such as, in the Christian community, the receiving of communion in bread alone without the use of a common cup during such a period.

I remain haunted by that government assertion that everyone matters equally. There are many in this country for whom it does not feel like that. This Sunday, I shall be worshipping at St Hilda’s, Cross Green, in Leeds, where there is a particular ministry to asylum seekers, some of whom are terrified by fear of the authorities. In a situation such as that of a pandemic, there will be a particular responsibility on faith communities both to affirm that ethical affirmation of DCLoG and to care for those who often feel themselves to be rejected by others.

I also want to make a quite different contribution to this debate. If the threat of a pandemic is an immediate concern—and it is, and the public health agenda needs to deal with it—so there is the longer-term threat to our public health of alcohol abuse. How are the Government developing their policies to combat such abuse? In the city of Leeds alone, the cost to the local economy of alcohol-related harm is estimated at £275 million a year. The cost to the NHS is vast. The cost to individuals, both temporary and long term, is encountered in damaged lives. I suggest that this is one of the most significant current threats to public health and that we have developed a culture of alcohol abuse that needs determined combating.

I take noble Lords, as I have been, to the accident and emergency department of St James’s Hospital in Leeds. A chaplain has been called to support a family where the grandfather has just died; a precious moment of farewell and commendation that we have all experienced in one way or another. It is Friday night, and this is the casualty unit in a large city, so that farewell takes place in the context of staff struggling in a battlefield, responding to the needs—the genuine needs—of intoxicated strangers. It is not a farewell that I would wish on anyone.

Those who work as professionals in public health are in my experience convinced that action must be taken to limit easy access to cheap and destructive alcohol. The Government seem to have turned their back on Sir Liam Donaldson’s call for significant price rises in this area, but it is not clear to me what other strategy will be able even to begin to deliver us from the human and financial costs being incurred. Responsible drinkers would be little affected by price changes. For those given to abuse, there needs to be a progressive impact to encourage a speedier return to personal health and stability. We have found ways—we could probably find better ways—of doing that for tobacco. Perhaps amendments to the Health Bill on Report will strengthen our response to that particular problem. There needs to be a similar strategy on alcohol.

So much of the human tragedy in our society has alcohol abuse as an element within it, whether it is domestic violence; whether it is increasing numbers of people going to prison and therefore becoming subject to the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has raised; whether it is to do with broken relationships, or with our ability to take that exercise that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, so ably advocates. There needs to be local work involving primary care trusts and faith communities. There also needs to be government action to promote behaviour that serves the community and to foster personal responsibility. The Government are rightly determined to do that in the case of a pandemic. I look forward to similar commitments on the much longer-term damage of alcohol abuse.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Knight of Collingtree, for introducing this debate on public health, which could not be more topical. I do not think that the debate was planned to take place in the very week when the world is plunged into the vital need of public health across the globe due to swine flu. It may be better referred to as Mexican flu, named after the country of origin, as were Spanish flu and Hong Kong flu. This is a complicated virus, containing pig, fowl and human viruses. The fight to control a flu pandemic will involve many professional bodies, and the public should be kept informed with the correct information and guidance to take the necessary precautions.

Having visited Mexico some years ago and having succumbed to Montezuma’s revenge, resulting in the most violent diarrhœa and sickness, I wonder whether Montezuma has done something to make this virus worse in Mexico. When I flew over Mexico City, there were miles of shanty town on the outskirts of the city and a cloud of pollution hung all around. Many of the so-called houses were tin shacks, and many people were living in poor conditions. Poor housing often contributes to poor health.

The virus seems most complicated. I have a few questions for the Minister, as we did not have the planned Statement yesterday. Does the virus have a window of about three weeks when a person may be infected, but the test does not show positive? Does the manufacture of the quantities of vaccine needed not require thousands and thousands of eggs? Do we have enough eggs? Does Tamiflu have a sell-by date? If so, is our stockpile still in date?

The fourth report of the 2005-06 Session of the Science and Technology Committee, Pandemic Influenza, asked the Minister whether the Health Protection Agency, responsible for frontline management and the emergency strategy on the flu pandemic, will have enough funds and capacity as some of the agencies have been merged. Is it adequately equipped to manage if the pandemic spreads? Will there be enough testing capacity? Will more people be drafted in to help, and will funds be made available to cope? What are the plans for distribution of antivirals?

For some years, the World Health Organisation and our Chief Medical Officer have been telling us that there will be a flu pandemic. The world is now on full alert. The importance of public health and other organisations coming together and working for the good of society is absolutely vital. There must be good communication with the public and honest, transparent networking.

As a precursor to my Question on 13 May about the cases of Panton-Valentine Leukocidin—PVL—positive staphylococcus aureus, I am concerned that this public health matter which can come in from the community and affects young, fit people and children who pick it up from playgrounds, sports halls and military camps, can be missed through a lack of knowledge by GPs and hospital doctors. The symptoms are flu-like. The body’s immune system packs up and white cells stop fighting. If not treated, victims can die in a few days. The last case that I heard about was that of a student from Harrow School a few weeks ago, who became very ill with PVL MSSA. This has been a serious problem in the USA. There needs to be very good surveillance and awareness, as there are so many different strains of MRSA. Another concern is that of pigs infecting humans in countries such as Holland. Does the Minister agree that there should be a close working relationship between veterinarians and microbiologists? There should also be close co-operation over the serious problem of variant CJD and blood safety.

Public health is of huge importance in our prisons, as my noble friend has said. With conditions such as HIV and tuberculosis, prisoners need to be on courses of medication. There is no guarantee that they will continue treatment or seek medical care once they are released into the community, especially if they are homeless and have multiple diagnoses. Prisons have different systems that do not communicate with each other, making it difficult to establish an offender’s medical history. Only a few prisons use online systems. On a recent visit to Pentonville prison, which has a high incidence of tuberculosis, it was good to meet a dedicated nurse specialising in TB, who works between prisons. She told us that multidrug-resistant TB was a great concern. With the homelessness and chaotic lifestyle that many prisoners have on discharge, that is a serious public health risk. Drug and alcohol misuse is also a huge problem. When asked how the prison contains an infection outbreak, they recommended that screening within 24 hours of arrival is crucial to safeguarding the prison against the spread of infection.

For many years, I have felt that there should be a good, all-round health education in all of our schools. Children should learn that healthy eating and exercise will give them the best chance in life. They should learn about the dangers of type 2 diabetes and how to avoid it, about the result on their health if they smoke, and about sexually transmitted diseases and substance misuse. There should be more testing in the community for conditions such as venous thromboembolism, or VTE, which accounts for more than 25,000 deaths in England alone, and for so many others which, if detected in time, will save people from having long-term conditions as well as from dying early. Prevention of illness is so important.

I shall end on a positive note. On Tuesday, I went to an exhibition at the Design Centre, “Design Bugs Out”. The Design Council, the Department of Health and the NHS Purchasing and Supply Agency brought designers together with clinical specialists, patients and front-line staff to test an innovative approach to procurement. They should be congratulated on that excellent initiative. There was equipment there such as bedside cabinets, a commode with rounded edges and disposable pan, a patient bedside system, a patient’s chair and a porter’s chair—all with curved, smooth edges—an intelligent mattress with an inbuilt early warning system, which allows soiled mattresses to be identified and replaced as soon as they become contaminated. There was also equipment for doctors and nurses, such as blood pressure cuffs and a cannula time tracker. All were easy to clean, to help overcome health-associated infections such as MRSA and C. difficile. This is to promote good clinical care. Equipment is likely to be cleaned properly if it is easy to clean. This exhibition will be taken around the country and I hope that orders will be placed.

I am pleased to learn that the National Institute for Clinical Excellence is increasing its public health promotions. If public health is neglected, it will be at our peril.

My Lords, if persistence is deemed to be an Olympic sport in 2012 I will be there when the noble Baroness, Lady Knight of Collingtree, picks up her medal. I thank her for giving us the opportunity to have this wide-ranging and absorbing debate.

As the daughter of a Methodist minister who was also a chaplain, I found the right reverend Prelate’s speech most perceptive and very moving. The question asked by my noble friend Lord Addington on sport and health prompted me to think that, if you were to ask three different government Ministers what a boxing match was, you would get three different answers. The Department of Justice would say that it is a means of reducing youth offending; the DCMS would probably describe it as a noble art; and the Department of Health would point out its potential for causing sub-cranial neurological trauma and consequently the necessity for it to have a risk management programme attached to it.

A few weeks ago, a fast-food chain announced that it would create 6,000 jobs. At the same time my colleagues on Leeds City Council explained that they were going to make about 300 staff redundant. When they were challenged on the “PM” programme, they explained that a number of their sources of funding and revenue from central government had been cut but that they were also suffering other losses of income, including loss of revenue from their swimming pools because people cannot afford to use them. That is a deeply depressing symptom of a recession, but I want to stress the importance of the public health agenda now and in the future.

The Faculty of Public Health defines public health as:

“The science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through organised efforts of society”.

To that one can add that the politics of it all is about providing the means to do so. At times of economic recession, it is easy to see public health as a soft target and an easy place in which to make cuts. However, I want to try to persuade the Minister that to do so would be false economy. I do not want to repeat at length the details of the Budget. I am sure that noble Lords will have absorbed all that for themselves by now. However, I should point out that for the next two financial years Department of Health funding will stay broadly the same. People in the NHS have breathed a sigh of relief about that. However, we should encourage them to see those two years as a very short window of time within which they, as health professionals, should work with the Government to reorient the NHS to be a major bedrock of public health development. If they do not, in about four or five years’ time we will be left with the remnants of a health service that may well have been fit for purpose in times of affluence but is not so in times of recession.

In February 2009 the Health Select Committee in another place produced a fascinating report on health inequalities. It is a fair report and acknowledges that the Government have attempted to tackle health inequalities, have bravely set themselves demanding public health targets and have targeted resources at areas of deprivation. However, one of the most striking and compelling points made by the committee is that there is a lack of evidence with which to judge the effectiveness of the programmes that have been funded and their cost-effectiveness. The report says that, all too often, the Government rush in with insufficient thought and do not collect adequate data from the beginning. Frequently, objectives are unclear and policies are changed or implemented with such short timescales that meaningful evidence cannot be gathered.

If anything, the Health Select Committee understated the case. The ability to evaluate public health interventions and the lack of an evidence base for doing so not only affects the NHS and other government departments but hampers the work of the voluntary sector. I point out to noble Lords that the great bulk of public health and preventive work is carried out not by the NHS, or even by the state, but by charities and the voluntary sector. Their work is also seriously impeded by the lack of an evidence base.

Politicians of all parties are under no illusions whatsoever that, in future, public services will be under increased pressure. There will be an imperative to make sure that funding of services goes to the most efficient and effective. I particularly ask whether the Government agree with the Health Select Committee that Professor Sir Michael Marmot’s forthcoming review of health inequalities is an ideal opportunity to introduce new evaluation methods that are ethical and economical. Do the Government also accept that Sir Michael’s review should include work on inequalities in secondary care and, therefore, should review the payment-by-results framework?

The Government have done a tremendous amount of work on such matters as coronary heart disease and cancer. Not to acknowledge that would be churlish. We need from that work the evaluation data that enable us to see how the NHS can become more productive in future. My noble friend was right: the majority of work on public health is not done by the NHS at all; it is done by other government departments. The WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health recently stated:

“Communities, neighbourhoods and cities that ensure access to basic goods, that are socially cohesive, that are designed to promote good physical and psychological well-being, and that are protective of the natural environment are essential for health equity”.

Social reformers since the 19th century have been trying to persuade Governments of just that.

My colleagues in another place, Vince Cable and Nick Clegg, have stated repeatedly that a key part of our economic recovery will be investment in green technology and in such matters as environmentally sustainable housing. If there is to be a silver lining—and I am not Pollyanna, by any means—it will be that Governments rise to the challenge of making radical changes to the planning system and infrastructure development to bring about communities that have better health outcomes and reduce health inequalities.

In the short time available, I will mention one further matter. The Healthcare Commission, under the leadership of Anna Walker, ceased to be at the end of March. Its final report was on mental health and older people. It is an excellent report, which I commend to the House. I mention it because it is a public health matter to which very little attention is paid. As with other services, there is a lack of data, but the Healthcare Commission found in its research that, for older people, access to mental health services—and particularly to crisis and emergency mental health services—is wholly inadequate, just because those people are aged 65 and over. In times of recession, it is understandable that Governments put the bulk of their resources towards those members of the community who are most economically active, such as younger adults. However, older people are the biggest users of public services. I hope that the noble Baroness will encourage the department to look at the report’s recommendations, which are not really for large-scale further public funding. They are for better data and systems, so that existing services can be made better.

In 2004, Derek Wanless pointed out in his report on the National Health Service that, for the health of the nation to be drastically improved, public health and the awareness of individuals about what they could do to lead healthy lifestyles would be important. Five years on from that and standing as we are on the brink of a recession, it is even more important that his message about the priority of public health should be taken up by the Government.

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Knight is to be congratulated on her customary wise and incisive speech introducing this important topic. I am grateful to her for giving us the opportunity to debate it because, far-reaching as it is, public health is an area of policy that tends to receive less than its fair share of discussion in your Lordships’ House.

When defining “public health” to myself, I tend to go back to the words quoted by the noble Baroness, Lady Barker. Those words originated with the former Chief Medical Officer, Sir Donald Acheson, who, I remind the House, spoke of public health as,

“the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organised efforts … of society”.

That definition has been tweaked by the present Chief Medical Officer, who has brought in the more current subject headings of health inequalities, clinical governance and the management of risk. The distinguishing feature of public health is surely that it relates to initiatives that reach across populations and groups as opposed to the curative treatment of individuals. One could range far and wide to topics such as housing and education, even taxation, and still not stray off the subject of public health, but I should like to focus today on issues that fall directly within the Minister’s purview and on one in particular about which we have heard this afternoon: health inequalities.

If we seek to identify improvements in public health over the past 20 years, we can point to a number of successes. On what might be called the big ticket issues, life expectancy across the population is improving and infant mortality is falling. The rate of improvement is not as great as it is in some other western countries, but it is still an improvement. Among the major targets in public health policy, we can look with some satisfaction at the trends in smoking prevalence and the consumption of salt in the diet where, taking the bald averages, both are both going down.

However, there are other areas of public health where success has been more elusive. Sexual health is one, dental health is another and the one about which we hear quite a lot, obesity, is proving a very difficult nut to crack. The evidence on these three areas is that they are much more of a problem among lower socio-economic groups. That is the reason why part of the Government’s public health strategy has been to target specific areas of health inequality—that is to say, disease areas that affect certain subsets of the community most damagingly.

Health inequalities are a stark measure of a Government’s success in delivering good public health, so it is welcome that the Health Select Committee in another place has recently subjected this aspect of the topic to close scrutiny. Its report makes fascinating and sometimes depressing reading. Over the past 10 years, health inequalities have in fact widened, not only between the rich and the less well-off but also between the population as a whole and other sectors of the community who are seen as being harder to reach: ethnic minorities, those with mental health problems and the elderly. To call the Government’s record a failure because of the widening gap in inequalities would perhaps be overly harsh, because it is a tough test, but unfortunately the charge of failure begins to stick when we look at the committee’s findings elsewhere.

The committee’s most damning criticism relates to the Government’s whole approach to policy in this area. I would describe it as a lack of intellectual rigour. It is a story of eye-catching initiatives which are poorly designed and rushed into being without proper baseline information or clear objectives. Evaluation of these initiatives too often consists of simply examining the processes that have taken place and asking people what they thought of them. To compound the sin, there has been short-termism—changes of direction and a failure to maintain policy long enough to know whether it has worked. The net result, in the words of one witness, has been that,

“we have wasted huge opportunities to learn”.

Indeed, large amounts of money have been poured into initiatives such as health action zones, healthy towns, healthy schools and the expert patient programme. What we get at the end of them is a series of inputs, throughputs and customer satisfaction measures. None of them has produced results that tell us what we need to know, which is what interventions actually work. Professor Ken Judge of the University of Bath put it quite brutally when he said:

“We end up with rich descriptions of what people are trying to do. These ... are then used as evidence of good practice because we do not have anything else and we slide inexorably from setting these things up essentially to the production of propaganda”.

The committee was uncompromising in its conclusions. It said:

“Such wanton large-scale experimentation is unethical, and needs to be superseded by a more rigorous culture of piloting, evaluating and using the results to inform policy”.

Of course, much of the public health agenda is delivered locally through PCTs, but here again there is cause for concern. The committee found that strategic health authorities and PCTs are not providing satisfactory leadership in public health. The number of senior public health specialists is falling. We have seen funds for public health siphoned off into other areas during times of budgetary pressure. My own view is that we need to look again at the idea of ring-fencing a goodly portion of the public health budget to prevent the same thing happening again.

More than that, when tackling health inequalities, there is a perception that many PCTs are simply unsure of how to spend their funding allocations to the best effect. If that is true, it again reflects poorly on the quality of leadership, not least national leadership. There is a drive by the Government to improve access to GP services, which is welcome. Equally welcome is the intention to rebalance the QOF towards public health goals. But other things have suffered. I am thinking particularly of early years intervention with mothers and young families, where the scope to combat health inequalities is considerable; yet the number of health visitors and midwives—the very professionals best placed to deliver help—has also been falling. NHS dentistry has been one of the Government’s stated priorities; yet, again, reality belies the rhetoric. Access to NHS dentists has gone down since the introduction of the new contract. None of this is exactly a story of stunning success.

Central to much of the effort in this area are health promotion campaigns. We have seen a succession of such campaigns over the years, a lot of them related to healthy eating. On the plus side, there is evidence that some of the key messages are getting through. As a nation we are eating more fruit and veg than we used to and taking more exercise. Our intake of alcohol is going down. But the key issue here is not the averages; it is whether enough of the right people are permanently changing their behaviour. The Minister will be aware that the King’s Fund has levelled some serious criticisms on exactly this point. It and others have stressed that one-off advertising campaigns cannot hope to change deep-rooted attitudes and behaviour. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister how the latest TV campaign, “Change4Life”, hopes to overcome that criticism.

The rise in obesity continues, as does widespread alcohol abuse among teenagers. More than two-thirds of adults still do not know what exercise they should be doing, what amounts of alcohol are unsafe and even what a portion or fruit and veg consists of. If we are aiming to create, in the words of the Secretary of State, “a lifestyle revolution”, what can make us confident of doing that? In the final analysis, if we cannot improve public health, we will not be able to afford the NHS. That is why this debate is vital and why, in one form or another, we shall return to it over the months and years ahead.

My Lords, it is with great pleasure that I respond to this debate and to the opportunity provided by the noble Baroness, Lady Knight, to highlight the Government’s public health agenda. I congratulate her and other noble Lords on an interesting debate. She has drawn attention to issues of which the NHS is aware and is acting on, from matrons to the organisation of wards and infection control, which are of course of great importance.

I do not accept the failures in regulation alleged by the noble Baroness, given that in the past there was virtually no accountability for doctors and other medical professions at local level, which is why we have focused during the past 10 years on giving our regulators a wide range of toughened enforcement powers and have enabled the new commission to take direct and independent action against service providers that fail to meet essential levels of safety and quality which people are entitled to expect.

I entirely agree with the noble Baroness that we need to deal with mixed-sex wards. The Government have never denied that. The Secretary of State announced in January a six-month drive to eliminate mixed-sex wards in hospitals. Three cornerstones underpin the programme: a £100 million privacy and dignity fund; improvement teams established to help those hospitals with challenges in this area; and working to establish financial covers in the context of the contracting framework between PCTs and hospital trusts.

The Government’s approach to public health cannot be described simply by a list of initiatives. It is about how we deploy our health resources and the leadership that we provide in this area. Our leadership is a response to our passionate belief that good health is a shared priority from the bottom to the top of the nation. Our starting point was that in 1999, only 1.8 per cent of total health expenditure went on prevention and public health. We now spend more than 3.6 per cent—double that spent 10 years ago.

Not everyone sees that as a good thing. Earlier this year, my right honourable friend Dawn Primarolo, the Minister for Public Health, pointed out that there is a school of thought that there is no such thing as public health. According to that view, any intervention in public health and any act to give individuals or groups support, guidance or safeguards is somehow an attack on their liberty. She rejected that argument, and so do I. Choice and control can be an illusion when you are very poor and in ill health. For those living in such communities, it is practical, tailored, focused support that makes the difference. That is our aim. For example, the health of communities collaborative programme is working in 28 sites among the most disadvantaged communities to raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of cancer and cardiovascular disease and to encourage people who may have those symptoms to seek help early. It is a community-based approach to public health that can be tremendously successful.

We believe that we have come a long way towards our aim to provide services that reflect changes in people's lifestyle, habit, environment and society. We believe that our campaigns are now much more sophisticated than they were in their targeting and their understanding of people's motivation to change. For example, the smoking campaigns funded by the Department of Health have been widely acclaimed by marketing experts in both the public and private sectors. However, as noble Lords have mentioned, those campaigns cannot work on their own. That is why Change4Life is rooted in research about people's behaviour and how they change their lives. It tells people how they can make positive changes as well as warning of the dangers of obesity. Clearly it is up to individuals what they eat, drink or smoke. It is not the Government’s intention to intervene unnecessarily or stand at their shoulder in the kitchen, as it were.

Our sexual health campaign has generated almost 1 million visits to the Condom Essential Wear website. More than half of 16 to 24-year-olds say that they are more likely to have a check up for a sexually transmitted infection as a result of seeing the advertising. We have already heard from the public and the media of lives saved following our stroke awareness publicity. Some may remember that I described FAST in your Lordships’ House, with visual aids. One clinician in Kent has reported seeing around 200 patients as a result of the campaign’s message. We estimate that the new cervical cancer vaccine will save the lives of up to 400 women a year.

There are other campaigns aimed at informing, supporting and empowering individuals and families to make healthy choices. These include seasonal flu immunisation, pandemic flu preparedness—I will refer to that again in a moment—stroke awareness, sexual health, HIV and having an NHS life check. All our major campaigns are evidence-based and subject to evaluation.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, raised the issue of sporting and physical activity. Change4Life, launched in January 2009, focuses on pregnant women, parents of babies and toddlers and parents of pre-school and primary school children. In future years, we will see the development of programmes targeted at young people and adults. For example, £140 million was invested in our free swimming programme. The walking your way to health scheme, led by the Department of Health, Natural England and the British Heart Foundation, delivers nearly 2,000 walks to more than 30,000 people each week. We are determined that as part of our legacy for the Olympic Games, 2 million adults should be more active in 2012. This will include active travel, dance, gardening, and active conservation. We are measuring the activity that contributes to this target of 2 million people through an extended version of Sport England’s active people survey.

The noble Lord kept asking me who is responsible for this. It is a cross-government activity. It can only be delivered across government. The Department of Health, for whose activities I am partly responsible for, has its part to play, as do all the other departments mentioned by the noble Lord. He also mentioned the sports and exercise consultants. We had an exchange about the importance of the provision of sufficiently qualified medical experts for the Games and about establishing consultants and medical facilities as part of the legacy of the Games.

The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, made an eloquent comment about health in prisons. Like him, I am looking forward to reading the report of my noble friend Lord Bradley. I know that the Government will look very carefully at his recommendations. The challenge that we have—the noble Lord will be only too aware of this—is that, since 2006, all prison health services have been transferred to the NHS; we are mainstreaming their services. Therefore, our target is that prisoners receive the same standard of healthcare as we would expect in the rest of the community. However, we know that that is easier to say than deliver. Indeed, there is a great deal more to do.

My Lords, are we going to hit the number of 72 consultants in sports and exercise medicine within the NHS?

My Lords, the noble Lord knows that part of the 2012 delivery is that there has to be a sufficient number of sport and exercise medicine consultants. If I recall correctly, that is two medical experts per event during the Games. I will write to the noble Lord again about this if he so wishes, but I am not going to go into it in detail now. We have every intention of delivering both the legacy and the Games properly medically equipped.

I thank the right reverend Prelate for being so on message about the Government’s work in these uncertain times of the threatened pandemic. I take on board his comments about the need to be aware of the challenges of the asylum-seeking communities and other communities at this time of uncertainty. I also thank him for his support for our forthcoming debate on point of sale for tobacco. We take very seriously the issues of alcohol raised by the right reverend Prelate. There is good evidence that cheap alcohol is linked to people drinking more and subsequent harm to their health. It is important that any Government intervene to reduce harm without, as the right reverend Prelate said, unduly impacting on the majority of responsible drinkers. We are looking to develop the evidence base on that issue.

The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, raised the threatened influenza pandemic. All NHS organisations have comprehensive plans which they are now bringing into action at the appropriate level. Every resilient forum in England has validated pandemic-specific plans, which were outlined by my noble friend on Tuesday in the Statement and yesterday in answer to a Parliamentary Question. I will not go into a great deal of detail. I am quite happy to give the noble Baroness and all noble Lords the latest briefing on this matter. But I can refer her to the website, which is very informative and is being kept up to date. I assure her that we will return to this issue and will keep the House fully informed about any developments during this uncertain time.

The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, made a very good point about how we will use the next two years, and about the importance of investment in the public health agenda. We are considering the Marmot review and taking it very seriously. I agree with her that the Healthcare Commission’s final report was very important. I undertake to follow this through and to make sure that it is given proper consideration.

The noble Earl, Lord Howe, raised a variety of issues about healthcare, public health targets and the various programmes that we are undertaking. The health and equalities targets were deliberately set to be ambitious and some progress has been made, although there is a great deal more to be done. We believe that there is a lot of headroom within the system for improvement. Our focus now is to provide tailored, intensive support to deal with issues such as high infant mortality, new GP practices in the most deprived areas, additional support for the early presentation of cancer and CVD, the take-up of vascular checks in disadvantaged areas and programmes to support communities, such as the improvement development agencies, healthy communities and communities for health.

One of the noble Earl’s colleagues in another place criticised Change4Life as a campaign that was an attack on the video games industry. Would the Conservatives spend more or less than Labour on public health information campaigns and do they support the Change4Life campaign, or does the noble Earl agree with his honourable friend that this is just a campaign against video games and that they are bad for you?

Finally, some time ago my right honourable friend Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Health, said that we are committed to examining what the future of public health policy should look like. We have a good record of success. We continually try to improve. Throughout my response I have highlighted some obvious examples of how we are making a difference to people’s health and well-being. We are investing in health; we are concerned about what health means and what public health is all about. I am grateful that we are able to continue this shared debate and look forward to hearing from colleagues in the future about this matter.

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. Although we have not had many speakers—perhaps that is not surprising on the last day before a bank holiday weekend—all the points made have been varied and very interesting.

The point of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that aspirations must be achieved, was a good one. He asked whether they will be achieved and whether we are sure that they can be achieved. There are doubts in many places about that matter. The House was most interested to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham. From his great experience he made a strong case for some fundamental changes in the way that sick prisoners are treated and under whose ambit they should come. I hope that his remarks will be taken on board, because they were thoughtful. Springing as they did from experience, they were worthy of great concentration and thought.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds drew attention to something that no one has mentioned until now: the work and the willingness of faith groups. That is an important point that we often miss. I hope that the Minister will bear in mind the amount of good will and good intentions to help difficult areas in the health service. The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, talked not only about the pandemic but about the education that was necessary. I thought that that was a different and important point in the area of healthcare.

I listened with great interest, as I always do, to the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, who made some wise suggestions about the importance of directing finance. I hope that those comments will be listened to.

My noble friend Lord Howe talked about health inequalities. That is a subject on which he or I could speak for a very long time. It concerns us, and I hope that the Government have taken on board the worrying statistics that he gave us.

The Minister talked about mixed wards. I hope that we shall not be put off in the way that we have been in the past by saying that mixed wards have changed. At one point the Minister told me that 92 per cent or 93 per cent of all patients were not in mixed wards. I found out that the truth was that they were not in mixed wards because the name of the ward had been changed to an assessment ward. So one could say that they were not in mixed wards, but the wards were mixed: men and women were there together. They were not intensive care wards.

I thank most warmly everyone who has taken part in the debate, and I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Motion withdrawn.

In moving Amendment 1 I shall speak also to Amendment 4, with which it is grouped. I am happy to report that there is common agreement on this across the Committee: between us and the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, the noble Lord, Lord Henley, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss.

The purpose of Amendment 1 is to increase the minimum period of cohabitation required before cohabitants without children will be able to make a claim for a financial settlement order. A discretion to waive the qualifying period is dealt with by Amendment 4. As noble Lords know, the Bill is designed to protect cohabitants who demonstrate a certain level of commitment and likely interdependency. Where existing law recognises the rights and responsibilities of those living together, a minimum period of time is usually required before cohabitation is established. Schemes in other countries take this approach and it reflects the proposals made by the Law Commission. It also avoids the use of less definitive eligibility criteria which may cause uncertainty and complexity, and does not open the floodgates to people in very short-term relationships.

I wonder whether I may intervene in the fascinating opening speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lester. My understanding is that Amendment 1, grouped with Amendment 4 in the name of the noble Lord and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is tabled in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, then myself, and then the noble Lord. I do not know whether the noble Lord has spoken to the Lord Chairman, but for some inexplicable reason the noble Lord has been asked to move it. Would it not have been right for the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, to move it, since her name appears first on the Marshalled List, followed by mine, then his, and lastly that of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss?

It is entirely in the hands of the Committee. However, having begun to explain the main purposes of the amendment, and as the controller of the Bill, I would have thought that this was always what we wished to do. I would have thought that it would be more efficient and less wasteful of time if I completed my speech. If the noble Lord feels hurt by that, the last thing that I would want to do is to cause such hurt, and I shall sit down. However, in terms of understanding our purpose and for the debate, it would be more courteous to the Committee if I spoke. If the noble Lord, Lord Henley, disagrees, I shall sit down. Does he disagree?

No. I just find it extraordinary that the noble Lord did not bother to speak beforehand to either myself or the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. I can only speak for myself, but I am sure that we will leave the noble Lord to explain this amendment and in due course we will speak to it. We shall also speak to his Amendment 4 which is grouped with it, and about which we have some considerable concern. No doubt the Government will respond in due course. We will then have to work through all the other amendments on this Thursday evening and see how we get on with the Bill. I shall leave the noble Lord to speak, but it would have been polite of him, to say the least, if he had spoken beforehand either to myself or the noble Baroness, Lady Deech.

I certainly did not intend to be rude and I apologise if I seem to have been impolite. I shall therefore proceed as quickly as possible so that there is ample opportunity for others across the Committee who support the amendment to speak. We can then deal with the later amendments as speedily as possible.

I think I have explained that the Law Commission has suggested that a period of two to five years would be appropriate. A five-year period would protect those in longer-term relationships, and it is arguable that there is more likely to be a financial imbalance in such a relationship. There are arguments in favour of the two-year period because there can still be significant unfairness and hardship where people have lived together for less than five years. We would support this amendment, but alongside Amendment 4 which provides a discretion to waive the five-year qualifying period in cases of exceptional hardship.

It is important to be clear that the Bill also protects cohabitants with children. Under the Bill, a child’s primary carer can apply for financial support whether or not they have lived with the child’s other parent for five years. That is vital for the following reasons. First, the number of people cohabiting is continuing to increase, as is the number of children being born to cohabiting couples. Cohabiting is now the fastest-growing family type, and by the second quarter of 2008 the proportion of dependent children living with cohabiting couples had increased to 13 per cent from 8 per cent in the same period during 1997.

Secondly, the existence of children makes it more likely that one partner will suffer the economic disadvantage if he or she is the primary carer of the children. The current law affecting cohabiting couples takes no account of their relationship and does not aim to achieve a fair outcome between former partners. The vast majority of unmarried primary carer parents cannot secure provision for childcare costs from the child’s other parent to enable them to work. Thirdly, children’s financial wellbeing is dependent on that of their parents. The risk of poverty is exacerbated for children of separated cohabitants because of the current lack of financial protection for dependent partners.

So, that is why we originally put in the two years. We seek to increase it to five years because we are very anxious that this Bill should be as cost-effective as possible and there should not be any unnecessary public expenditure incurred. We well understand the Government’s dilemma because of the current economic recession. That is why, subject to the discretion in the other amendment with which this is grouped, we are strongly in favour of adopting a more conservative approach of extending the period from two years to five years with the discretion. I beg to move.

I say what I do about this amendment with certain principles behind me which also apply to all the amendments in the name of myself and the noble Lord, Lord Henley. I have tabled this amendment and many others in order to reduce litigation. This is for the sake of our daughters, and sometimes our sons, and for the sake of our grandchildren and their stability. This is against the background of the bitterness always engendered in family proceedings between two people who once had a good relationship. It is against a background of an industry of mediators who may not have had as much success as was promised 10 years ago, and against a background highlighted again only today in newspapers that fathers simply will not pay for their children. We know about the organisations that fathers support and the inexplicable refusal of men to take care of the families that they have left behind and the inability of the state to get that money out of them. We have to be realistic.

I speak to this amendment also against the background of the change, only this week, of family proceedings being heard in open court. The details that come up later on in the Bill, those in Clause 9—indeed, the whole situation—will be heard in open court. The judges may throw out the journalists, but every couple caught up in this situation will have to say to themselves that the details of their commitment, the details of their relationship or non-relationship, may be all over the press. They will have to recite all of that in front of a courtroom full of journalists. I also say this against the background of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, on the right to respect for private life, and the fact that we all have a human right to follow a path of relationships that suits us. This is sometimes outside the law. There is no disapproval of that. If we wish to stay outside the law and to have a private life, we have that human right.

Professor Stephen Cretney, former Law Commissioner with responsibility for family law some years ago, brought his mind to bear on this situation, in particular the length of time as set out in this amendment. He said that his approach was strongly influenced by the belief that litigation in the context of intimate relationships is very frequently if not always destructive. Of course it is right to provide a remedy for injustice, but care must be taken that the cure is not provided at too great a cost. I do not believe that it is the function of the legal system to provide a remedy for every situation in which someone could plausibly argue that he or she has suffered loss. Certainly, the legal system should not provide an opportunity for what can easily become a form of harassment. That is the problem with both the amendments in this group. The question is not so much whether in the end a claim would succeed but whether it could plausibly be put forward, and the cost is financial and emotional.

I am extremely sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness. She is speaking to the amendments—hers is the leading name of the group who have tabled them—but she seems to be ranging over the whole purpose of the Bill and a lot of other things that are not directly connected with her amendments. We had an interesting Second Reading debate for which I was present throughout, and many people made extremely interesting speeches, including the noble Baroness. Should we not perhaps get back to the amendment?

Before the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, responds, perhaps I may remind the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, that quite often the discussion ranges a little wide on the first amendment to a Bill. I am not sure that it has ranged wider than Amendments 1 and 4. The noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, has been here for some time; it is not unusual for that to happen on the first amendment to a Bill as we clear the air before getting on to the issues. I am sure that every word that the noble Baroness has said on Amendments 1 and 4 has been on the subject. No doubt every word she still has to say will be on the subject, and no doubt others will want to speak.

I thank the noble Baroness for her helpful intervention. I wish to explain that by saying some of these things now we will save time on later amendments. In essence I want to say that five years is quite short enough and that Amendment 4 would simply open the door to litigation as soon as two people had lived together. We must realise that cohabitation tends to be a very short event, followed by marriage or separation. There are likely to be children with older couples who are already taken care of under Schedule 1 to the Children Act 1989.

The children’s plight was well described by the late family court judge, Mrs Justice Bracewell, in a lecture to Gresham College. She said that cohabitation with different fathers of children does not provide stability, but stability is what I am seeking to promote by having a longer time, as in the first amendment. Stabilility is what children need.

Amendment 4 is in the same group, but it is fundamentally different. It undermines the period of five years. It virtually sweeps that aside and says that for any two people who claim to have lived together for only a short period—note that there is no definition of living together, as the Bill does not even refer to living together in one household—one of them could go to court and say, “Well, this is an exceptional case and I want this right”. It would extend the possibilities of harassment and blackmail as pointed out by Professor Cretney. Indeed, any cohabitants excluded under any definition will complain. Amendment 4 might provide something for polygamous wives; though very many of them will be taken care of by the provisions that already exist to give financial provision for “wives” of void marriages. It is not the policy of this country to provide for such situations and there will be extra, expensive litigation over whether or not this new clause, were Amendment 4 to be passed, should apply.

To conclude on this point, most commentators on this have pointed to a 10-year period as the right one. The public, when surveyed, think there is such a thing as common-law marriage. However, when questioned in more detail, it is only when you get to a 10-year period that the public think that there should be rights. When the period of cohabitation in the scenario put to the public is reduced to two years, only 38 per cent of respondents think that a cohabitant should have a right to financial provision on separation. I support this amendment, but would extend the period to five years. However, I put it to the Committee that Amendment 4 is extremely dangerous and expensive in time, in stress, in legal aid and in private funds.

I too have my name down to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and I support the move to extend the period from two years to five. I support it because it makes a bad Bill a slightly less bad Bill, but I certainly do not support Amendment 4, to which we will come later, which seems to undermine the very purpose behind Amendment 1. I also have to say that I am now in a state of slightly greater confusion on the whole matter of that period of two years or five years. I always thought it would cause problems and therefore create work for the lawyers—which the noble Lord, Lord Lester, always denied—because there is always the problem of defining when that period of two years started. Did it start with this one-night stand, as it were, or that one-night stand, or whatever? Does it start when the toothbrush moves into what becomes the joint home? We all know what these things are like.

I am now told that it is not just a continuous period of two years or five years; it can be a whole series of a week here, a week there, a week whenever; so we have even greater evidential problems of defining how and when that two or five-year period lasts. No doubt the noble Lord, Lord Lester, who seems to have grabbed this group of amendments, will, when he comes to respond, let us know something about those evidential problems of defining the two years and the five years.

I move on to Amendment 4. I shall try to be brief, bearing in mind what the noble Lord, Lord Lester, had to say. As I said, I believe this undermines what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and I are trying to do in Amendment 1, and therefore, I will oppose the amendment. I appreciate that the two amendments are grouped and they appear together in the groupings, but I will just remind the noble Lord, Lord Lester, of the mantra that is attached to the list of groupings produced every day by those who serve us in this House. It says:

“Although every effort is made to secure agreement to these groupings, they remain informal and not binding. It is therefore open to any Peer to speak to an amendment in its place on the Marshalled List”.

Therefore, I will—along, I presume, with the noble Lord, Lord Lester—support Amendment 1, because I think it will improve the Bill. However, when it comes to Amendment 4, I certainly will not support that amendment and I do not feel that I am bound by the groupings to accept it.

Before the noble Viscount sits down, may I ask for his help? He interrupted my opening speech, and I apologise if there was any impoliteness. Amendment 4 is grouped with Amendment 1, and I have not yet spoken to it. Would it be for the convenience of the Committee if I completed that now, so that we have it all in one piece, or would it be preferable for me to deal with it by way of reply, which would have the inconvenience that others cannot then reply to what I say? It seems to me to be better if I briefly explain Amendment 4 at this stage. I should be very grateful for guidance from the noble Viscount, Lord Henley, as to what he would like.

I am very grateful for the repeated promotion of my status in the peerage, but I assure the noble Lord, Lord Lester, that I am a mere Baron like him, and I have not risen to the dizzy heights of a Viscount. Before the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, intervenes, it is open to the noble Lord to speak on it now, if he wishes, or later. If he speaks to it now, it is still open to other noble Lords to address him on that matter, because we are in Committee on the Bill, where there are no binding rules on what happens. Before the noble Lord gets up, I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, wishes to intervene.

I accept all the points about there being no binding rules, but it seems to me that the normal courtesy of the House is that someone moves an amendment before others speak to it. I am in the hands of the Committee.

I did move the first amendment. Amendment 4 is grouped with Amendment 1.

What I was trying to explain to the noble Lord is that it may be a courtesy for the person in whose name an amendment stands if they have the opportunity to explain why they have put their name to the amendment. Then other noble Lords can speak to it.

Shall we leave it to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, to say whatever he wants to? It might be that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, wishes to speak.

I have a feeling that Amendment 4 is in my name. I should like to respond on Amendment 1 and then move Amendment 4, if that is thought to be appropriate.

The noble and learned Baroness needs only to speak to Amendment 4, as only one Motion can be before the Committee at any one time. Because the amendment is grouped with Amendment 1, it would be totally appropriate for the noble and learned Baroness to speak to it.

I may have slightly confused the Committee. I was trying to make it clear that we are talking to Amendment 1, but I will not feel that I am bound by the convention on groupings, whereby if the first amendment in a group is accepted, one then accepts that the others come with it. I am making it quite clear—I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, will agree with me on this—that if the Committee agrees to Amendment 1, she and I certainly do not feel that we are bound to accept Amendment 4, and we will oppose it in its due place.

It appears to me as though it would be appropriate for me to speak on Amendment 1 and allow Amendment 1 to be completed. Then I will move Amendment 4, if that is right.

Although it is not for me to tell anyone what to do, I think it may help if we degroup these two amendments, because the Committee is getting into a difficulty. Therefore, if we deal with Amendment 1, after it has been decided on, the noble and learned Baroness can decide whether to move Amendment 4.

In that case, I will speak on Amendment 1, which I strongly support. I notice that, although the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said that it would be preferable if it was 10 years, no one has put that proposal forward. We are dealing with five years and, so far, as the Committee will see, there is unanimity about five years. That is clearly right, because it demonstrates a couple’s commitment to a genuinely serious relationship.

Two to five years was supported by the Law Commission. There are people who need help, even though they choose not to marry or are unable to. From my perspective, the Bill is intended to meet a narrow but crucial problem. Since the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has already spoken rather more broadly, I will speak on a matter relating principally to those who would not need five years.

Children are obviously born to those who cohabit as well as to those who marry and they generally suffer when parents part. There is a group of women—and, occasionally, men—who are left, usually by the man, with children and no maintenance or other support. These women find that they have no right to the house, because it is in the man’s name. There is a major problem for the state as well as for the children and their carer, because the state picks up the bill where the man should. He should pick up the bill not only for the children, which certainly comes under the Children Act 1989 and subsequent legislation, but also for the mother—or, occasionally, father—of the children who is left to look after them; he should pick up the bill not only for maintenance but, at least, for a roof over their heads while the children are young.

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has made the point that Schedule 1 to the Children Act 1989 appears to provide for the carer of children as well as the children. However, that must be read subject to Section 8 of the Child Support Act 1991, which does not permit a court to deal with maintenance for the benefit of children where the respondent to the application earns less than £104,000. That is not the group of families with which the Bill is concerned. There has been the occasional case where money has been paid. A Sudanese woman wanted to see her child in the Sudan and got her air fare. However, actual maintenance for the woman for the benefit of the children where the man has only modest means is not met by Schedule 1 to the 1989 Act. I respectfully disagree with the distinguished and learned academic the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, but my experience as a former judge and, much more important, that of family barristers and solicitors is that this schedule is scarcely used and has scarcely been of any effect. The Bill would cover that problem. It would take the children off the state, which is one of the most important things.

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, spoke of the importance of there not being litigation and said that the Bill would promote it. A later group of amendments to the Bill deals with alternative dispute resolution. The noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, as the promoter of the Bill, supported by me and those behind us—the Resolution Foundation and the Family Law Bar Association—think that ADR is extremely important. The draft rules for family proceedings have family dispute resolution. You would not be able to take advantage of that unless we had ADR in the Bill.

The suggestion that being in open court will cause a flood of the public is, if I may say so, pitching it a bit high. The public are not entitled to be in the court, only the press. I cannot believe that the press will attend every county court case, which is where those cases will be heard before circuit or district judges. There will be no publicity, because the rules put forward by the president of the Family Division in his recent practice direction say that the press can say nothing that is not approved by the judge; one of the most important points that you cannot have will be the names of the family. If the Bill goes through, it will get the benefit of that practice direction and, whatever blackmail there might be behind the scenes, it will not be on publicity. I must ask the noble Baroness: what sort of blackmail goes on by the men? Women suffer from blackmail as much as men. I do not see these as the floodgates.

Another point in Clause 8, to which we will come and which is not in dispute, shows that the woman will only get enough money for her “reasonable needs”, not a footballer’s girlfriend’s bonanza. It will be for a limited period, because she should be expected to get back to work as soon as possible. Consequently, I do not see that the points made by the noble Baroness should trouble the Committee, while I am particularly happy that we are, so far, all in agreement on five years instead of two—an entirely sensible amendment.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester, who sadly cannot be present this evening, spoke at Second Reading of being a critical friend of this Bill. The result is that these Benches can support some of the amendments, but not others. I apologise that I shall shortly have to leave the Committee to get back to my day job, but the fact that these Benches will then be empty does not reflect a lack of interest on our part. We hope to play a full part at a later stage.

Before I go, I am pleased to support Amendment 1. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, referred to Families in Britain: An Evidence Paper, prepared for the Cabinet Office in December 2008. We were told in that work that about three in five first cohabitations turn into marriage and that less than a fifth of cohabiting relationships survive five years or more. It would, therefore, seem that five years is about right as a qualifying period for protection.

Before I come to the amendment, perhaps I should declare an interest as a cohabitee. That is not entirely of my choosing, as I have asked the lady in my life on several occasions to change the situation. To date, my blandishments have not been successful, but mutual friends have said that that shows good judgment on both our parts. However, as we put things on the record in this House, the publication of that declaration in Hansard may—who knows?—help to change the situation.

At Second Reading, my noble and learned friend Lady Scotland made it clear that the Government do not support this Bill, believing it to be unnecessary and to take the wrong approach to addressing the mistaken perception that cohabitation comes with a quasi-marital legal status. A better approach would be to seek to correct the mistaken perception, rather than to change the law to match the mistake. We also believe that the approach adopted by the Bill would generate large-scale litigation, with a vastly increased burden on the parties, the Legal Aid Fund and judicial resources.

Amendment 1 would, it is true, go some way towards reducing the scope and impact of the Bill for those affected by its provisions, but our concerns remain. As the Committee has heard, it is also true that, according to the 2001 census, the number of unmarried couples living together is over 2 million—and I would suggest, as has also been said, that cohabiting couples are more likely to separate than married couples. Yet our concerns remain.

Given both the time constraints and the lateness of the hour, it might help the continuation of the debate if, rather than intervening on every single amendment to offer a government view, I were simply to invite those Members who wish such a view to be expressed to seek it. I would thereby intervene not on every point, but only where the parties believed that the Government’s view might add to the elucidation of this matter.

I think therefore that procedurally the right thing for me to do now is to move Amendment 1. I beg to move.

If I might respectfully say so, I think it should be Amendment 4.

The noble and learned Baroness will have to speak to Amendment 4 in its place when we get there.

This amendment seeks to highlight the fact that such advantages as might be conferred by this Bill will be confined to those who are not family members and not related within the prohibited degrees. I find this inexplicable. The purpose of my set of amendments is to extend whatever law we end up with to those who are in family relationships. There is no definition of cohabitants contained here. Sexual relationship is presumably not necessary, or fidelity or any particular relationship save an assertion that two people are cohabitants. It seems to me wrong to omit from any benefits that might flow from this the elderly daughter who has looked after a father for many decades, or two sisters who have cared for each other and shared a home. Indeed, to omit those who are within the prohibited degrees piles discrimination on discrimination. Our human rights say that there should be no distinction drawn in law in the rights offered thereby depending on marital status. To deny any of the benefits of this Bill to, say, a brother and sister living together seems to me to discriminate against them, and I cannot see why this should be. The point about prohibited degrees is to prevent people from forming a sexual relationship that is unhealthy and bad for children genetically, but it has nothing to do with the financial support that one person may demand from another, or, much more importantly, what the situation might be on death.

I have spoken before in this House, as have others, about the two sisters, the Misses Burden, who are in their 80s and have lived together and shared a house throughout their entire lives. They have argued repeatedly, including in front of the European Court of Human Rights, that they should have the benefits that married couples and civil partners have, particularly on death, and that they should be allowed to postpone inheritance tax when one of them dies so that the survivor does not have to find a sum—£60,000 in this case—which would probably mean that the house would have to be sold and the remaining sister would become a burden on the state. There is agreement around this House that this should not be the case.

This House has tried before, during the passage of the Civil Partnership Bill in 2004, to include people who are within the prohibited degrees in some of the tax benefits that are given to others. The proposal was passed but fell later on the ground that that Act was not the place to do it. This Bill therefore seems to be the place to do it. We all have a great concern for the burdens shouldered by carers, who are often close family members within the prohibited degrees. They could not marry or enter into a civil partnership, will not be deemed to be cohabitants and will get none of the benefits, such as they are, in the Bill.

By debating cohabitation, this House shows that it supports unions and commitment and that it thinks that support should be given to cohabitants who have fallen out. Surely it must be the same for—let us imagine—two sisters who have expressed fidelity to each other, supported each other and become dependent on each other. Article 14 says precisely that there should be no distinction based on birth or other status. I have mentioned it before. In the case of two family members, the length of commitment goes on until death. It has never ended; there is no question about it. One needs to avoid upsetting them and making them feel bitter and resentful because benefits are given to cohabitants.

I simply cannot understand why the possibility—not even the existence—of a sexual union is of such importance. It is very odd indeed that only a sexual union should attract the benefits of the Bill. The Government took down the barriers between marriage and other forms of association by giving advantages to civil partners of the same sex. Now that that barrier has been taken down, there is no logical case for not including in the Bill two family members, such as two sisters or a father and daughter. Of course, what they get will be at the discretion of the court. It has nothing to do with anything unpleasant, which is what prohibited degrees are normally associated with, but it is discriminatory to deny relief to two people whose companionship has lasted for decades.

To illustrate the discrimination that arises from the Bill, imagine three sisters. One is very pretty and lives with a footballer for a while. One marries a vicar and their union lasts for many years. She works extremely hard, but they have no money. The third sister never marries and looks after her elderly father for decades. Under the existing law and the Bill, we will end up with a situation where the vicar’s wife, on divorce, will probably get nothing because there is nothing to go around. The lady who lives with a footballer for a while will get a great deal. I do not believe that reasonable needs are treated meanly by the family courts. There is the recent, extreme, example of Sir Paul McCartney’s wife, whose reasonable needs were estimated at £28 million. The courts have full discretion. We do not know at all how that will come out. The ones who get the benefits are the ones who find rich men. That is what is so upsetting and why family members should be included.

I wonder if I would be forgiven for saying that the current law in relation to footballers’ wives comes under the Matrimonial Causes Act. The House of Lords has made it clear that the phrase “reasonable needs” is no longer appropriate between spouses. The words “reasonable needs”, which used to be the law between husbands and wives, is no longer the law between them. That is why the phrase is in the Bill. It takes us back to a situation where a moderate sum is paid, not a footballer’s wife large sum. They come under House of Lords decisions, which are a completely different state of law.

I am referring to footballers’ girlfriends and to the clause in the Bill that, at the moment, includes just about everything in consideration of financial relief, although I hope that we will cut it down dramatically. There is no telling what those reasonable needs will be. Two sisters or a father and daughter cannot, of course, take advantage of Schedule 1 to the Children Act, which allows for support for the mother of a child. If there is anything wrong with it, it could be amended, but it would be a pity when all that is necessary is a small amendment to Schedule 1 to bring in this whole panoply of cohabitation law, which as it stands will simply lead to family members, such as sisters, who have lived together feeling hard done by because their contribution is not recognised. I see no reason why they should not be included. Later I hope to speak to an amendment about inheritance tax, but for now I think that family members should be included.

How would the noble Baroness answer the question about whether her amendment would drive a coach and horses through taxation law? The noble Baroness may not believe that inheritance tax should exist but I happen to believe very strongly that it should exist because of the distortions created within society by the passing on of great riches. Would this provision not be used as a way of undermining the taxation system which seeks to create greater equity within our society?

I completely share the concerns of the noble Baroness. Later we shall come to an amendment in which I propose a discretion for the court to allow for a roll over or deferral of inheritance tax—simply a discretion. I do not for a moment suggest that we should create a loophole whereby any two family members can use this to avoid inheritance tax. The Committee will know of the much debated and much discussed case of the Burden sisters. That is the one situation which I have in mind. I also cannot see the logic of knocking out prohibited degrees of relationships at this stage. We are not talking about people forming a sexual relationship; we are simply talking about a situation in which two, possibly elderly, members of one family live together. They alone will be excluded from the benefits now given to divorcing couples and civil partners.

Can the Committee be clear about whether the noble Baroness has moved Amendment 2? It is,

“page 2, line 7, leave out paragraph (b)?

Yes, I beg to move.

I have great sympathy with the problem of the Burden sisters and others. During the consultation on this Bill one of the original ideas that we put forward was that it might be possible to do something for siblings and other carers in that capacity. In the end, the reason why we decided to limit the scope of the Bill as we have to cohabiting couples in a sexual relationship was because we realised that if we tried to widen the Bill to cover siblings and carers of all kinds, it would be inconceivable that any Government, including a future Conservative Government, if there were one, would ever accept such a measure. We remembered Rab Butler's famous reference to politics being “the art of the possible”. There is no fundamental difference in principle about the need to do something for people like the Burden sisters. Of course, they lost their case in Strasbourg, where the court said that there was no obligation to deal with the difference of treatment from which they suffered.

I apologise for referring to the noble Lord, Lord Henley, incorrectly as “Viscount”. I meant no disrespect at all, rather the contrary. The noble Lord will remember that we have been here before. During the passage of the Civil Partnership Bill, an attempt was made to widen it beyond civil partnerships to all carers, a topic which was put again and again by those who sought to oppose or wreck the Bill. The Government firmly resisted that. I should be interested to know whether that would be the position today, although I know the Government have reservations about the Bill as a whole.

We have been very careful about how the Bill is now framed and the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has not complained about this on any earlier amendments. The Long Title makes it very clear what the Bill is about. It states:

“Provide certain protections for persons who live together as a couple or have lived together as a couple.

Clause 1(1)(a) says,

“in the event of their ceasing to live together as a couple”,

and in the definition of “cohabitant”, Clause 2(1)(a) says,

“live together as a couple”.

So the scheme of the Bill is that there is a sexual relationship between a cohabiting couple. The condition in Clause 2(3)(b), which the noble Baroness wishes to delete, is that the cohabitees,

“are not within prohibited degrees of relationship in relation to each other”.

In other words, although the Bill is dealing with a cohabiting couple, what is being proposed is what in marriage would be regarded as incest. I know that is not the noble Baroness’s proposal but that is what it comes to. We have been extremely careful to make sure that the only people who can benefit from the Bill are those who are not in prohibited relationships in the same way as would apply to marriage.

The noble Lord mentioned living together as a couple and then went on to say that this implies a sexual relationship. This definition is not in the Bill; it is novel and I do not think that all of us would assume that living as a couple entails a sexual relationship. What about two people aged 90 in an old-age home—where, no doubt, all of us will find ourselves one day—who decide to share a home with a carer? I do not think there is any requirement in this Bill for a sexual relationship and we cannot presume that it is there or that it should not be.

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, should do justice to herself. She knows perfectly well that the reason why she is seeking to delete the paragraph on prohibited relationships is because she wishes it not to be confined to a sexual relationship. She is under no doubt that the Bill is dealing with a couple living together in a sexual relationship. If that were not clear, we could make it absolutely clear later in the passage of the Bill. She is seeking to apply it to brothers and sisters and everybody else implied by “within prohibited degrees” because she wants to do justice to the Burden sisters and to carers generally. She also wants to deal with inheritance tax. She does not want to abolish inheritance tax; she wants to treat a cohabiting couple in a non-sexual relationship in the same way as a married couple, but giving a discretion instead of a right, so that when, let us say, the man dies and the wife—or in this case the cohabitee—would normally be liable for inheritance tax, that can be postponed. I understand why she is doing that but it is wholly outside the scope of what is in intended and would kill the Bill. Since I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is an enemy of the Bill, I suspect that is her true object, but I strongly oppose the amendment for the reasons I have just summarised. It would not be possible for any Government, including a Conservative Government, to approve a Bill of this nature, dealing with it in this way. I hope to hear from the Minister on that point.

Before the Minister responds, I will say a word or two. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, that I also remember the Civil Partnership Bill on which my noble friend Lady Wilcox spoke for our party. That was a government Bill, which seemed appropriate for a matter of this sort, and we explored—although I do not think at any stage we voted on—the question of what, for reasons of simplicity, we will refer to as the case of the Burden sisters and others. I would not suggest pressing this amendment to a Division at this stage, partly because, although I am speaking from the Front Bench, I am not speaking for our party, as we do not do that on Private Members’ Bills. I am responding for myself and I imagine most right-minded people in the Conservative Party would agree with me, but I have no idea what any future Conservative Government are likely to do in relation to a Bill of the sort that the noble Lord has put before us.

What I know is that most of us would think that a matter of this sort is more appropriately dealt with by a government Bill, as was the Civil Partnership Act 2004. It might be that this Government, in their dying days, if they can find nothing else to do, will bring forward such a Bill and we could have some fun discussing it.

At this stage on a Thursday evening to be discussing matters of this sort when we have another 30 or 40 amendments and we are quite obviously not going to finish the Bill seems pointless. All I can say is that I have extraordinary sympathy for the amendment; that is why I added my name to it. It is right that one should do something to help with inheritance tax or other matters relating to financial support those who are living together but are not necessarily cohabiting in the noble Lord’s sense of the word. I therefore support the noble Baroness on her amendment; it may not be the right amendment to divide on, but there may be other amendments later on which we want to divide, because there are major financial implications. At this stage, we would all be very grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Brett, could explain to the House what those are and give the Government’s view, because this is one amendment—there will be others—on which the view of the Government is very important.

Before the Minister gives us the benefit of the view of the Government, perhaps I may say a few words. I first declare an interest as counsel for the Burden sisters in their unsuccessful claim in the European Court of Human Rights. Some counsel invariably convince themselves, if not the court, of the justice of every cause that they are advancing. I am not in that category, but I share the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, that the Burden sisters and others like them are unjustifiably discriminated against by the state in being denied similar tax and other benefits to cohabiting partners who are not related. I very much hope that the Government will listen to the repeated concerns expressed by the noble Baroness and others that a step should be taken to amend inheritance law to remedy the injustice to the Burden sisters and others in their circumstances.

However, the Bill is not an appropriate vehicle to secure that aim. The Bill is intended to remedy a specific social mischief. To expand its aims would inevitably make it even less likely that it will be enacted.

I, too, have the greatest possible sympathy with the amendment and with the noble Baroness in her promotion of it, but I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Henley, that this is a matter that ought to be in a government Bill at some stage. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, I should like to think that the Government will look at the matter, because there is a manifest injustice to the people involved, but it is not appropriate that it should be in the Bill. The Bill is intended to deal with men and women and single-sex couples living in a relationship which has some analogy with marriage. It is a relationship, whether it is sexual or not, which is treated as a couple in a way that two sisters or father and daughter are not so treated or so understood in ordinary language. I hope that the noble Baroness would not feel it necessary to press the amendment for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Henley, has already given.

It is reassuring to hear the support for the amendment. An answer to two small points would enable me to let go of this. One is that the noble Lord, Lord Lester, has indicated that the way the Bill is drafted, together with the amendment in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Henley, must mean that a couple is having a sexual relationship, whereas the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said otherwise.

I did not mean to say that it was as narrow as that. The way it has just been put by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is the correct way of putting it, which is that it is in many respects analogous to marriage. It is not about whether there is actual sex; it is that it is a cohabiting couple in a continuous relationship. That is the point. We are not dealing with sexual matters, nor should we in the Bill.

That is reassuring. One of the scenarios we feared is questions when determining finance about the extent of sexual relationship. I am glad to hear that that is not included. It would be reassuring if the Government would indicate whether they have heard our concerns about the Burden sisters and will do something in the future for people like that.

I rise to inform the debate and not particularly to respond to it. These linked amendments effectively include Amendment 26, which also was spoken to. These amendments change the conditions that must be met for the Bill’s provisions to apply. The requirement to live as a couple remains, but the requirement that couple should not be within prohibited degrees of relationship is removed. This, as has been said, would appear to mean that, for example, a brother and sister could live together as a “couple” and be considered “cohabitants” within the meaning of the Bill, so that the provisions of the Bill would apply.

That would seem to me to raise at least several major issues, not the least of which is the difference between family members—brothers and sisters—and those who are married or in civil partnerships. The latter have made a formal public commitment with legal consequences, while brothers and sisters and other family members simply have not. Also, the families about which the noble Baroness and others have spoken may be the kind of families that are totally at one in understanding outcome and outlook and that never have even a tiff. However, that is not necessarily the situation in all families in the United Kingdom. It is quite possible to have someone living together as sisters or brothers, or a mixture of both, that fall out violently. The consequence of this, if it were to be enacted, would be the possibility of litigation once they have ceased to live together. The Committee will therefore understand why the Government are not supportive of these amendments.

The noble Lord, Lord Henley, invited me—tempted me, even—to suggest that the Government might have nothing better to do in their dying days than to introduce legislation. As the Committee knows, in 2006 Scotland introduced provisions similar to those recommended in the Law Commission report. We wish to learn and assess from its experience before we move down that track in any way. The noble Lord, Lord Henley—a near neighbour of mine in the beautiful county of Cumbria—and I are both quite proud of the size and quality of the chickens that we have in that county. I can only suggest that he should not count quite as many as he seems to have counted at the moment.

I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

This amendment and those coupled with it are about retrospectivity. One of the striking features about the Bill’s drafting is that it is retrospective in looking at cohabitation that occurred before the commencement date while at the same time ignoring agreements that might have been made before the commencement date. It seems to me not right that the law should apply to two people who started to live together before the Act, especially as they will have made no formal commitment, as the Minister has just pointed out. That is the whole trouble with the Bill. People who have deliberately avoided making a commitment are to have a law placed upon them. Yet, at the same time, in English law, when adult married couples make a prenuptial or post-nuptial agreement it is largely ignored by the court. It is an extraordinary situation.

Certainly, the law should not be retrospective. The retrospective application of the law is nearly always against the rule of law. This goes back into history. Citizens should know, in advance, before they take any action, what law will be applied to what they are doing. In the past, people will have entered cohabitation in the belief that it is a private affair between the two of them. They chose it deliberately because there would be no consequences. To come along at this stage and catch that previous cohabitation seems very unfair and contrary to what we normally understand the reach of the law to be. Blackstone and the Athenians were against retrospectivity. Allah is said to have been against retrospectivity. He allegedly said, “We never punish humankind before I have sent in a messenger”.

I fully support the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, in Amendment 3, which is grouped with Amendments 12 to 14 and attempts to deal with the whole problem of retrospection. I shall be very interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Lester, has to say on this in due course. I imagine that, as a good lawyer and a good human rights lawyer, he will be opposed to retrospection as much as we are. When the noble Lord comes to reply, perhaps he could also deal with the points I asked earlier on the commencement of the two or five years. I still think that it is a difficult evidential problem that will create a lot of joy for the lawyers and which we would like to have dealt with before we see the departure of this Bill.

How do we define when that cohabitation started? I talked rather flippantly of the one-night stand, or maybe the second one-night stand, starting off that process. Perhaps it was when the toothbrush moved into the other party’s quarters, or does it need slightly more than a toothbrush—for example, a suitcase full of clothes as well? No doubt, the noble Lord will be able to assist the Committee in providing an answer to the point that I asked him about on Amendment 1.

I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Henley, will have to hear me give the answer first. There is no reason why the noble Lord, Lord Lester, should not give it as well. I oppose the amendment. I take the point of my noble friend Lady Deech about retrospectivity, but we are dealing with a particular group of people who have been in long pre-existing relationships and who will need help. If we make this provision as from the date when the Bill becomes law, they will have to wait another five years before they and their children, who may by then be grown up, get any help of the kind that I hope the Bill could give.

It is intended that the Bill should be retrospective because it is there to help that comparatively small but significant group of vulnerable people, mainly women. A large number of battered women are cohabitants. They need not only injunctions on non-molestation orders but financial support. One without the other does not go far. So the legal aid that was being given, if it is given, to the battered woman would not be a great extension for her to obtain a certain amount of money to help her bring up the children.

The noble Lord, Lord Henley, made a point about the law. Under Clause 8,

“The court may make a financial settlement order if … having regard to all the circumstances, the court considers that it is just and equitable to make an order”.

Having been a judge, I declare my interest. If we are talking about a woman having a series of one-night stands, with the toothbrush moving from one place to another, she would not receive any money. That is the short answer to the point of the toothbrush. In addition, judges are perfectly accustomed to dealing with commencement dates and final dates of relationships; they have had to do it for years and years under the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. I have had to work out when people started to live together and in particular, because of marriage, when they parted. The date of parting was often extremely important in assessing whether they fulfilled the requirements of having been separated for a sufficient number of years.

It is a judge’s job to evaluate the evidence and come to the conclusion about whether either of them was telling the truth. In many cases between couples who have been living together, no one is telling the truth; as a result, the court comes to a practical conclusion. I see no difficulty; I am slightly surprised that the noble Lord, who has some experience of legal matters, should believe that this was a difficult matter for a judge at any level to work out when they started together and when they finished. They are all practical facts that can be found by the judge.

I declare another interest. I was a pupil of my noble friend Lady Deech at Oxford. I always listened carefully to what she taught me about the facts of life as well as the content of the law. One of the legal principles she taught me is that the courts will interpret legislation to deny retrospection so far as fairness and human rights principles require it to do so. That is sufficient protection in addition to the points with which I agree, made by my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss.

I shall deal with a number of points. First, the noble Lord, Lord Henley, asked how the court would assess a continuous period of five years. The answer is that the court is perfectly capable of dealing with it as a question of fact. The evidence would be put forward in the ordinary way, as it is whenever a continuous period is required to be determined. I see no difficulty about that and do not understand why there should be.

Secondly, I want to make a point that has not so far been made. Couples who live together for five years before the Bill comes into force but did so without wishing to accrue rights and responsibilities in respect of each other will, under the Bill, be able to opt out during the lead-in period. In that way, the Bill avoids imposing obligations on couples who do not wish to be bound by the Bill’s provisions, but it would cover those who do not so object and who deserve protection. There was very strong support in the consultation on the Bill to cover existing couples, and so far as retrospection is concerned, it is commonplace in dealing with remedial legislation—such as equal pay legislation, to take an obvious example—to give the benefit “retrospectively”, if one wants to use the word, in a period before a Bill comes into force to someone who is the victim of discrimination in some context.

It is absolutely clear that in the criminal law no retrospective penalty should be imposed because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has said, it is part of the rule of law and the principle of legal certainty. There is no problem about that. We are dealing here with remedial legislation with a full capacity to opt out. Therefore, my own hope and belief would be that this is fully compatible with human rights. Indeed, it actually promotes the rights of a willing cohabiting couple who want their accrued rights and responsibilities to be taken into account under the Bill. As I say, there was strong support for this.

However, I agree with the noble Baroness in her concern about legal aid in family proceedings, including public law family proceedings. Of course the costs of lawyers and litigation arise in the family area particularly when dealing with the ghastly complexities of, for example, trust law and matters of that kind. This Bill does not give rise to complicated legal issues of the kind seen in the principles of equity and trust law under the bad law that exists at the moment—bad law in the sense that it is unusable for working-class couples without the ability to pay for expensive lawyers. Therefore, I join with those who are opposed to the amendment.

A couple who found themselves before the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, would be fortunate, and her experience is valuable. But I must remind the Committee that if this were to become a retrospective law, most of those couples would never find themselves in a court. Rather, it would be trips to the solicitors after conversations along the lines of, “I lived with you 10 years ago and I left without a penny” or “I lived with you five years ago”. All that will be going on and form 99 per cent of the cases. Only very rarely would such a case make it into court, but retrospection will reopen the bitterness of old relationships. That is the danger, not what happens in court, where I have every faith in what the judges will do. Threats will be made and expenses incurred that will not be seen in court because of retrospection. There are also problems with an opt out, although this may not be the time to go into them.

I must appeal to the important principle that something as deeply profound in its effect as this law should not be retrospective. There needs to be publicity. I should like to test the opinion of the Committee because I believe it to be a very important principle.